Off, off and away….
I fly out tomorrow to Tokyo. Early.
There’s 10 of us going in total, me from Chelsea, 4 from Camberwell and 5 from Wimbledon. We’re a mix of disciplines – designer makers, fine artists, illustrators, graphic designers… and we will be doing our own research projects and then an intensive 7 day collaborative project with about 20 other artists invited by Tokyo Wonder Site.
My research is about information excess and overload. Last night I watched Tokyo-GA again. It’s the Wim Wender’s documentary which tracks his fascination with the disentegration of meaning within the torrent of images, embodied by Tokyo in the 80s. The opportunity to visit Tokyo is so perfectly aligned with my interests at the moment. I am really excited about what it might hold for my work.
However, I’m not a great traveller – I can get terrible motion sickness. So immediate thoughts are focused on actually landing in Japan.
Whilst we are there it is the first anniversary of March 11 – one year on from the terrible earthquake, tsumani and resultant nuclear power station melt down. It looks like we may travel to the north of Japan to the area near (though not in) the 20km exclusion zone.
I hope we will be able to step out of the tourist role, side-step the ethnographic pit falls, and into a real dialogue with other artists.
