[TALK] Two months in the future.

Everything seems to be covered in vending machines, minimal calendars and singing toilets. Spring starts in February, Fuji mountain is not a mountain. The words are bouncing off my head. The initial
sense of disorientation flourished into something I dare to call: a pure curiosity.
Matsudo – that was my destination. A city located eight hours ahead of Wroclaw, my place of birth,
and 17 hours ahead of Los Angeles, my last lost habitat.
The day happened to be gone already by my arrival, and at that same time, I found myself HERE –
in future.
Matsudo city is well known as a bedroom community for nearby Tokyo, but for me, it immediately
became a communal living room more than just a bedroom. My in-dwelling presence became a
constant socialization process. I had spent a substantial portion of my art in residency time not only
interviewing people but also interweaving with them in their surroundings. Together we were
combing truth and fictions, underpinning and sustaining things that matter. A pinch of cultural
adjustment mixed with sake and discussions beyond the language changed my perception of this
place greatly. It was not only a matter of timing and trimming but also a matter of the welcoming
Japanese hospitality while listening to all of the stories form World War II, from childhood, from now
and then as well as the future.
Quickly, I learned that some people visit Disneyland every week, a leek is a symbol for the city,
though it may be replaced by the white pumpkin, there’s a female astronaut who took the seeds of
that vegetable into outer space. I also have learned that there is a Jurassic park in Matsudo as well
as velodrome and a horse racing track. I found Krecik and Thomas Edison living together in a tiny
space by the fish market, I heard about the ghost of willow from a man in curry shop, I listened to
the Yagiri No Watashi, while watching exotic fishes somewhere by the old Mito Kaido route. I also
heard a wind symphony in Tojo, the former residence of TOKUGAWA Akitake, brother of the last
Shogun.
All the desires, dreams, plans and gossip have melted into one experience of mapping the memory of this particular place. I called it MadMaps, or maps of relationships. That’s how I marked the frame
of the geo-biographical project I have been working on. The plan was to find myself in the gap, an
interplay of senses, that helped me to look at people as the beating heart of the city. I believe that
the urban landscape doesn’t exist without the community, which is the force creating history. Every place is being wrapped up in amusing stories. Sometimes, in order to hear them, you have to enter
hazardous areas of “nostalgic landscapes”. That is how Matsudo stopped being just the territory
and became a socio-temporal terrain of exploration for me. I tried to focus on places that have
played a role in the lives of single individuals.
As soon as Fuji San becomes a Fuji Chan or Fuji Kun, you might be wondering, “Who are those
people?” As I started interviewing different persons I learned that the sense of animism is
omnipresent in the Japanese culture. The Country of Cherry Blossoms is certainly a constellation of
“Shinto-infused techno-animism”(1) that became very attractive to me as a researcher of the
ephemeral.
The fact is, I was here to listen and watch.
Reference:
(1) http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/30/2/84.abstract