Arata Isozaki: Electric Labyrinth

16 april 2003 - 24 august 2003

 

Curated by Hans-Ulrich Olbrist

April 16 – 24 August, 2003

 

On May 30th of 1968, during the press conference of the XIV Triennale di Milano several hundreds of artists, intellectuals and architecture professors from the Milan University storm the Triennale area and occupy it for the 10 days to come.

 

By the end of the occupation, this historical exhibition of 1960s critical avant-garde architecture is almost completely destroyed, the rooms of Archigram, Saul Bass, Georges Candilis, Aldo Van Eyck, Arata Isozaki, Gyorgy Kepes, George Nelson, Peter and Alison Smithson and Shad Woods, and turned to ruins. It will never open to the public.

 

As Italian urbanist Stefano Boeri shows in his analysis of the Triennale phenomenon: “The unifying topic of the show was multitude, it was dedicated to seeking an alternative to the massification of society in the concept of participation in culture with a capacity to safeguard individuality. The XIV Triennale had kept a keen eye on the protest movement taking shape in Italy at the time, as elsewhere.” Despite this fact, the exhibition planned by Giancarlo De Carlo with Marco Zanuso, Albe Steiner and Alberto Rosselli had been destroyed. But since, this invisible exhibition, experienced and ravaged in the space of a few weeks by a self-appointed mass of passionate scions and vandals, has become a focus point of strong emotions and passions.

 

Arata Isozakis installation, certainly one of the most important works of the Triennale, has been reconstituted thanks to the support of Castello di Rivoli, ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Fundação de Serralves, Porto and became visible for the first time on the occasion of the exhibition Iconoclash.

 

Isozaki describes his project for the Triennale in the following words : “I didn’t see the opening because it was completely taken over by these young artists and students protesting. At the time, of course, similar movements against the establishment were also going on in Japan. Because I sympathised with these protests, I tried to reflect them in my Triennale exhibit. I was given some space to create an environment, so I asked several artist friends to work with me. One is a graphic artist, Koe Siyura – one of the best, most creative graphic artists weve had in Japan since the war.

 

Another is a photographer, Shomei Tomatzu. And I invited a composer, Toshi Itchiyanagi, and asked him to create a kind of sound installation. My idea was to create twelve, very large curved panels covered with an aluminium surface on which numerous images were silk-screened. I chose from ukiyo-e prints about ghosts and terrible tragedies, and asked Tomatzu to find documentary stills about the atom bombs, rather than to use his own work. So, he brought a film and some pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One famous one is of a kind of shadow made on a wall at the time the bomb exploded. These were the images I put on the panels, which also moved anytime anyone passed through an invisible infra-red beam.

 

They would turn and suddenly you would see a ghost or a dead body, which completely involved you in the movement of these strange images. They almost all had to do with the tragedy of the war or the crisis in society. At the same time, there were also large walls, on which I made a kind of collage about the ruins of Hiroshima and the megastructure it would later become, which itself was in a state of ruin: a ruined structure on the ruins, which I titled The City of the Future is the Ruins. I was very much obsessed by these ruins of the future. I projected many images of the future city onto the wall. We tried to show how the future city would itself constantly fall into ruin. This was on the moving panels, which, whenever they turned, would be accompanied by Toshi Ichiyanagi’s strange sounds. I called the installation Electric Labyrinth“.

 

Hans Ulrich Obrist