Holey Objects
Suspend disbelief for a second – as solid as the buildings flanking Hikawa Street may be, in the right light, at the right time of day, they become so flimsy they might as well be made of wet tissue. Poke it and it’ll break.
The streets in Sagamihara themselves are mundane to the point that mundanity becomes its defining feature. However, that has never mattered to those who have no choice in where they create their first impressions of the world. Hikawa street was not the street that I lived in, I am almost sure of that, but it might as well have been.
In a city devoid of iconography, we learn to divine holiness in secular objects. If you believe enough, you can find a glimmer of sentience in everything. Ducts and pipes come crawling out, stairwells poke out from dark apertures and onto the street. The buildings are reaching out, and we return the favour by feeding them with the traces we leave behind.
In layering recorded images of the street (from Google Earth, old family photos) with memories, or imagined scenarios triggered by specific fragments of the street, my aim is to discover the holes in the city fabric, to prove that the city is a lot more porous than we might think, and that the image of the city is ultimately built by memories and impressions, fallible as they may be. The purposefully eroded depiction of the city would serve as my attempt at reviving the Sagamihara I lived in for three brief years.
One minute site
Project presentation
https://vimeo.com/490198709
Project book
https://1drv.ms/b/s!Akq8GJPgpOTnqhzJdzWBP9vvmPPM
