Yayoi Kusama’s Pumpkin, Naoshima

Uno to Naoshima Ferry.

Nobuyoshi Araki Installation at Uno Port.

Naoshima.

Chinu – the Black Sea Bream of Uno by Yodogawa-Technique. Made from garbage retrieved from a nearby river. Uno Port.

Il Vento by Tobias Rehberger, Teshima

Fishing Nets, Teshima.

Sea of Time by Tatsuo Miyajima, Kadoya, Naoshima.

Teshima

Teshima

As I was walking there, alone and in silence, I questioned if anyone would find me here, should they try. Was there any trace of my being here?

The artist Christian Boltanski says that his archive of heartbeats is proof of the lives of the participants. It is, at least, proof of around thirty seconds or so of what was, at the time of recording, a life. When you visit the archive you first see a monitor displaying the name of the owner of the heartbeat that you hear coming from behind the next door, as well as the date and the place where it was recorded. When you open the door into the main room you step into a heartbeat so loud that the walls seem to vibrate — or maybe that’s the effect of the bulb that flashes on and off in pace with the heartbeat.

When the bulb lights the room up for a split second rows of mirrors lining the walls become visible. Catching an image of yourself in one of the mirrors, you might say to yourself: I am here. Or, you may find yourself wondering about Sophia whose heartbeat (recorded in Paris, 2010) that you can hear and, in a way, see. Where else is her heart beating?

And where was I? I was not lost, but I was in a place where I could not be found. No one would even know where to look.

I remembered myself at 13 years old. I had stayed late after school for hockey practice and had to walk about a mile to the bus stop to get back home. Somewhere along the way I got lost. Lost: it was the end of everything. I sat down on a strange street and cried, sure that nothing would ever be right again because I was lost and no-one would ever know where to find me. The terror I felt then was nothing like the quiet sense of nowhere I felt on Teshima.

And anyway, there is always a way home; though we may not mean to, we leave crumbs wherever we go.

*

Les Archives du Coeur

You can search for people on the heartbeat database by typing in their name or a place or date — the artist has recorded heartbeats in London, Berlin, Helsinki, Stockholm and New York. I had the option to record mine and add it to the database for someone to hear in the little room in the little building on this faraway island. It would be my stamp on Teshima that said I was here. But I chose not to. I was content with leaving crumbs.

Throughout the islands, you will find eclectic artworks by Japanese and foreign artists in museums, abandoned houses and in the open air. The art and architecture blends harmoniously with nature on these mellow islands and demand to be experienced rather than just looked at.

Twelve islands are currently taking part in the Setouchi Triennale International Art Festival.

The Inland Sea

“Rather than art, it would be more fitting to discuss how each individual being perceives richness and fulfillment before they leave this fleeting mortal world. This perception is an intensely personal process that involves each person thinking for him or herself.”

                                   — Fram Kitagawa; General Director of Setouchi Triennale 2010 and 2013

Visiting the art islands of the Inland Sea was an intensely personal experience. Few of the artworks are mere things to look at, hung on a museum wall. Instead they were to be to be experienced; to enter, to physically connect with.

At Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima I slipped off my shoes and donned the provided slippers to view, first, Monet’s water lily paintings from the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, stepping across an inlaid floor of small cubes of white Carrara marble in a room where the walls are rounded so as to wrap around me, natural light blinking in from above. Chichu, designed by Tadao Ando, is built entirely underground and lit only by the natural light that comes in through the skylights and courtyards.

In slippers again, I walked towards and into James Turrell’s blue lights, and up and down the staircase of Walter de Maria’s Time/Timeless/No Time granite-and-gold leaf installation; walking around the piece, viewing from different angles and watching the movement of sun and time change my perspective.

In Naoshima’s Art House Project I wandered through old abandoned houses remade into works of art. At the Minamidera house I found James Turrell again. His house is a piece that requires visitors to enter a pitch dark room and feel along the walls to take a seat at a bench. And then … well, I won’t say as that would ruin the experience.

Haisha by Shinro Ohtake. Part of the Art House Project.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s contribution is a restoration of an Edo period shrine and construction of optical glass staircase linking the main structure to an underground stone chamber, “uniting heaven and earth”. You enter the chamber with a torch and look up at the shrine, and heaven, from below.

Go’o Shrine by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Part of the Art House Project.

At Naoshima Bath “I♥湯” (a play on words: it uses the character for hot water, which is pronounced “yu”) I steamed myself in hot water under the gaze of a massive elephant statue that was salvaged from a Thai sex museum, while surrounded by all manner of kitsch collected on the artist Shinro Ohtake’s travels.

No cameras (obviously) in the bathhouse. This is the exterior.

On Teshima at Les Archives du Coeur, I stood alone in a dark room as a stranger’s heartbeat, recorded in Paris in 2010, thumped in time to a blinking lightbulb.

Christian Boltanski: Les Archives du Coeur

But nowhere felt so intensely personal as Teshima Art Museum. This place, calling itself a museum, designed by Ryue Nishizawa, is shaped like a droplet of water and perched on a hill among terraced rice fields. The museum houses a single artwork, Matrix by Rei Naito. And it’s like nothing I’ve seen — and like nothing at all.

No cameras allowed in the museum. Here it is viewed from a distance.

The winding trail that leads to the museum.

No slippers here, you walk inside barefoot and are advised by a solitary, serene attendant to not step on the small goblets of water that skim across the floor. The water springs from little ping-pong balls placed on the floor, or from the rain that falls through the two large openings in the roof. Again, there is only natural light.

I was alone in the museum with nothing to break my focus on the little puddles breaking into streams that trickle away into the void. The only sound the wind, the birds and, in the distance, the sea. I wondered if this is what meditation feels like; I don’t think I have ever felt so close to absolute stillness. It is an emotional experience and one that is difficult to describe because, essentially, it was a feeling of nothingness. Just a careful contemplation of the something that lies at the point where art, architecture, nature and existence meet, and boundaries fall away. I didn’t want to leave.

I have been walking through Tokyo to the rhythm of David Bowie’s Where Are We Now. My walks, like the song, are a steady rereading of place names remembered, retreaded; names that are memories and walking through them just to feel their familiarity.

Just walking the dead.

When he sings, “had to get the train from Potsdamer Platz. You never knew .. that I could do that.” I recognise that odd sense of achievement in reaching the familiarity where you make a city your own. A city that you trust you have earned your right to wax nostalgic about. A city to whom you can say Tadaima! (I’m home), when you arrive at it’s airport for the first time in years. Or, a city that can be the focus of your comeback single when no-one has heard a peep out of you for nearly a decade and it makes sense. Nürnberger Strasse, Aoyama, Dschungel, Azabu Juban … the places are a part of you.

I can get a train anywhere in Tokyo. I can glance at the Metro map and compile a route, including transfers, in seconds. You could drop me on a street anywhere in this city and my feet would find the way home.

Ah, but home, It’s not really home anymore though, is it? I’m just walking the dead.

So this was my first visit to little Enoshima, with its beaches and surf, and what a time to visit: right in the middle of Golden Week. I was shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of other daytrippers walking around the tiny island. So much for getting away from it all.

Enoshima Station

Part of the Enoshima experience is travelling on the vintage Enoden train from Fujisawa to Enoshima station.

Enoden

From the bridge that leads onto Enoshima

The beauty of the sea and clean, fresh air comes as a relief from a long time spent in Tokyo.

Food stands line the little streets and alleyways on Enoshima, selling delicious treats such as mochi …

Mochi Maker

… and octopus presented in all manner of different ways.

Grilled octopus served on a stick

There are many shrines (Benzaiten, goddess of , among other things, water is enshrined here), offerings, and places to purchase offerings.

There is a lighthouse observation tower from which you can look out across the area and, if you are lucky, see Mt. Fuji. A ticket for the tower gets you access to the botanical garden at the bottom.

The back side of the island, at the bottom of a steep descent near the Iwaya Caves, is a popular spot for fishing shirasu.

Right now it is quiet. So quiet. Quiet enough that I can almost hear the whispering ghosts of 2005 – 7; the hustle and bustle of early evening when 20+ ruthless bitches battled for the use of two showers and the corners of too few mirrors to prepare for a night at the club — always with the rising optimism that this would be the night, the night you “make.” Make money.

The previous Australian manager’s — long gone now; settled in Sydney with a husband and three kids — friendly but firm notices are still tacked up around the house. Clean up after yourself. Ta! Keep the doors closed as cats are getting in. Ta!

But none of them are there anymore.

There are some nightlife workers carrying on the house’s tradition, but they are few: a Ukrainian on the third floor, a Japanese hostess working in Ginza, and a couple of Estonians who only leave the basement to tell us to be quiet.

The near-empty house is a reflection of Roppongi’s current nighttime state. It’s like this because — after the carnage of a financial crisis, puritanical governmental clean-up campaign, and masses of raids and deportations — who in their right mind would come here to work anymore?

Well, my friend C, desperate for money, returned in 2011 and, somehow she is still here. Lucky, she says. She overcame police, cheap customers and coworkers who unlevelled the playing field to not only survive, but to do OK as well. Not like before, but OK.

Up and down Gaien Higashi Dori there are signs warning both the flyers (touts: the mostly Nigerian men who bust their asses to bring customers into the clubs) that they are not allowed to approach potential customers, and potential customers that if they allow themselves to be guided into a club by a flyer, they will most likely have their credit card abused.

New Roppongi: Warning Sign on Gaien Higashi Dori

How the flyers can make money now, I don’t know. C suggests drugs.

I walk up and down the street looking for faces of the flyers that I knew and cared for, but there’s none. I wonder about them and where they have gone. Snippets of information suggest that generally their fates have been an unholy trinity of arrest, deportation, or death, but I hope for something more gentle like retirement; a flight back home.

I look also for old clubs; places I worked, places I knew. Most are gone either replaced with a new name or with just a dimmed neon light that stands as a memorial to a place, and time, that used to be.

Yesterday I met with an anthropologist studying the Japanese sex industry. She bought me lunch at Cafe 8 near the Grand Hyatt.

The anthropologist told me that the era I worked was an infamous time in Roppongi’s history and something that even she didn’t know a lot about.

The word “era” suggests closure. That the time was and no longer is. Though I am physically here in Tokyo, and I fit back into Tokyo as if I had never left, that Tokyo, the Tokyo where life happened in the nighttime, is, for me, gone. I can’t help feeling nostalgic.

Old Roppongi: The High Touch Town sign has even been replaced

When I lived in Tokyo I wandered for hours but I always had someplace to be at 8 p.m. Work. Now, I just wander, unanchored, and it makes me feel a little lost — but in the mental sense, never in the physical. I can wander through the streets that are imprinted on my muscle memory and never lose my way. I just follow my feet and they guide me through the city I know so deeply that their map seems to exist inside of me.

Shibuya Crossing

Nishi Azabu: Alley behind my house

Gaienmae

Azabu Juban

Roppongi Hills

Aoyama

Shinjuku Underpass

Shinjuku

Shinjuku Alley

Kabukicho

Back in my beloved, precious Japan for a few weeks.

It was my first time in Montréal though it felt comfortably familiar, like a second or third European city. I got the chance to hop on frozen toes through the snow; curl up snug in my hotel room overlooking the Cathédrale Marie-Reine-du-Monde; practice my terrible French, and overcome my irrational fear of ice skating (which stems from a childhood urban legend that told of severed fingers and blood on the ice.)

Though only a short break and a short hop, I was utterly charmed by Montréal.

View from the hotel room.

Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal

Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal

Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal

Museum of Fine Arts

Museum of Fine Arts

Cathédrale Marie-Reine-du-Monde

Quartier des Spectacles

Downtown Montreal at night

The above quotation is taken from a Guernica essay by Eamon Kircher Allen that was published in April this year. In April I had just returned from Egypt and was about to embark on a summer course through the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict. The power of nonviolence was in my system.

Through taking the course and talking to young Egyptian activists,  long-held understandings shifted. I started to realise things that should have been obvious. Authority, global order: these things are not rigid. Oppression draws power through our consent; we can withdraw that consent. Nonviolence does not mean inaction: it is often strategic.

In the ICNC course I learned a lot about strategy; about movements from West Papua to Burma and Chile; about different terms used for nonviolence (Satyagraha, People Power..) I learned about creative resistance (the Estonian Singing Revolution, Burmese clowns, Chilean cueca sola…)

As I moved through the year and from this place to the next I saw signs of dissent; civil resistance, and what Kircher Allen called the “common font of yearning for an alternative global order.” From Egypt to Mexico and the USA I saw people struggle for rights, recognition and to strategise a commitment to nonviolence.

Cairo, Egypt. February 2012.

Mexico City. September 2012.

USA

There is some nuances I still debate. Such as the photograph below.

It is a stencil of Mubarak and (what I am told is) writing that says “when will he die?” I saw others (that I didn’t photograph) of his image in a noose. I believe that words can be violence so do those images have a place in a nonviolent movement?

Luxor, Egypt. March 2012.

What about the destruction of property? Below is a photograph of the burned-out NDP building in Cairo. My first glance at it inspired an initial feeling of horror, which lifted when a woman smiling and taking photos of it expressed to me how happy the sight made her.

Cairo, Egypt. February 2012

A question posed in the ICNC course: If property destruction is violence then how should we think of the Danish Resistance blowing up Nazi railroad tracks?

I am learning and I am asking myself questions and I don’t understand much but I am trying. I still struggle with hopelessness and anger but I am trying to be an optimist. There is both optimism and despair in dissent but signs of nonviolent dissent give me hope. I think that is a good way to move into the new year.

Cairo International Airport. March 2012.