A Blue Dryer
She blew all the money she had that night on drinking. Summer rain was beating hard outside and the drum sound piercingly turned everything blue. Irresistibly, she was in a blue funk for a blue ending of her once in a blue-love, which appeared out of the blue and was gone for no reason. Maybe it was she who blew it, or it wasn’t her fault. No one knows why, but it certainly went wrong and left a mouthful of skepticism. A bolt from the blue playfully dried her tongue, and her blatant attempt of whimpering made the air turn blue, blue deeper than the dark sky with a scent of bitter alcohol. She shouted blue murder in her crackling voice when the thundering hit the volcanic predicament though it was unheard. She didn’t care, she was miserable and voiceless. The raining stopped jointly and carried her dehydrated love into distant lightning, which kept fecklessly pulsing second by second, as if persisting a sour reminiscence of the melancholy until she was blue in the face. She is a blue ribbon blue-stocking-blue-blood wannabe, who loves hanging out with a boy in blue, a blue eyed boy type. but that love was extraordinary, a true blue type that she genuinely felt for, even though she knew what she would find from it at the end is one in a million of broken hearts. The lightning and thundering were on repeat and hypnotized her drunken eyes enough to play pretentious gestures as though she were to be blue. The humid air mocked her stupidity, the odour of alcohol pitied her well-made fantasy, saying that she should have blue pencilled her devotion very carefully in advance. Although she thought she couldn’t take it anymore and the more frigid she tries to be, the more a blue film inspired sweetness overflowed to refill the aridity. She just couldn’t hold it back, in the course of the given dryness, it rehydrated her with the caresses from the past that she kept daydreaming of, at the deep down growing fed-upness. "I, everyday, breathe, eat something listen to music, and talk with people. The more I'm getting into something, the bigger I'm overwhelmed by a sense of loss, which is like a huge wave swallowing me. Now we're paralysed by an evolving high-information-network, and we've created a communication which is seemingly freedom. However, occasionally, it is full of possibilities which makes us as individuals déraciné, or it may already be déraciné. Like this way, a loss of a home, a sense of futility, a sense of emptiness, which indicate a freedom world, affects and attracts me, because incomprehensible things make me excited..." Extract of Akira Nagasako's Offical Statement written in 2020. https://www.instagram.com/akira_nagasako/ With a series of performative employments anti cool confuses the position of an Artist, smudging detail to reveal the iconographic and reconsiders the day to day routines of our unmediated reality. A recent documentary Plena Rondo Leaving Language explored the concept of Esperanto and has been screened across the UK. anti cool developed a film for Leaving Language called Echo Tides, it was screened throughout the exhibition at The Metropole Gallery Folkestone England. Let’s imagine we were not ourselves, we woke up transformed into another being, an alien being with none of the familiar things we had yesterday. Our speech was lower and sounded as if it had been slowed down, we enunciated precisely but created a monstrous slur of vowels: the detuned strings of guitars or a fire howling through Marshall amplifiers, this is the sound of cinema. The phobic positioning of others and the absence of empathy has been an ongoing concern for anti cool. Her new work Echo Tides shot in Folkestone, hauled in it's nets nostalgia, eroticism, sacrifice and regeneration, as well as fish and crustaceans caught in the muddy Dover Straights. In the pages of a screenplay we scroll through words: cold, sea, a fog that lifted slowly, in soft Spring light a boat on the coastline was slowly revealed. Fishing is the type of industry which politicians use to create Island fictions. In the foggy haze of morning, trays of ice and fruits of the sea crunched together. Gills filled with tears that secreted memories, the fish dripped blood into the image, we were leaving language and could not survive out of water. Whelks, crabs, lobsters ... The ellipsis marks an omission from speech or the writing of a word when their meaning can be deduced from a context. The echo sounder and the radar detect signs useful to the mariner but we are concerned with Artworks and synonyms to learn and "like" on Facebook. Time rewinds itself in warm beds when we are dreaming, the person drags a net into the sea; a black, backless gown; cut low to reveal a spine, this is what you wear to make Art in waters that are cold enough to cause pneumonia. The nets were empty and the sea was dark and sublime; who was this terrible monster between continents that hauls sailors to their deaths. What was speaking or making that sound? "Folkestone, Folkestone ... " Tatsumi Orimoto has created a unique relationship to the mediums of performance, film and photography enabling an audience to become essential participants in the production of Art. With the development of instant imaging his strategy now seems like a prophetic paradigm, understanding the dominance of photos in the construction of identity and memory. Tatsumi Orimoto hosted Grandmother's Lunch at The Grand Burstin Folkestone for Leaving Language and the sculpture Big Shoes was on show at The Metropole Gallery Folkestone in England. This is how memory haunts the world in which we live: it is through shrines that we remember the dead, the past recedes away from us and fills the spaces between things. This exhibition began on a warm Spring evening in Kawasaki, the curator was playing with Art Mama while Tatsumi Orimoto cooked. It was her last night in Japan where she had been introduced to Midori Mitamura, Noe Aoki and Mio Shirai at Tatsumi Orimoto’s retrospective Art X Life at Kawasaki City Museum. In May 2017 he performed in Venice as part of the conceptual project The Contract organised by Venice Agendas. The work was called I Make Up And Become Mama. This was a tragic spectacle, unexpected in its poignancy and heightened by a shuffling melancholia. The artist walked across the Rialto Bridge and through Piazza San Marco wearing the giant Big Shoes made for Art Mama, the scene seemed to inhabit a reel of film dropped on the edit room floor. No matter how much the Artist tried to forget, home was far away. Distracted by the impending and inevitable passing of Art Mama over the river to the afterworld, she died two weeks after his return.
Those red shoes were placed by a suitcase that took them to Italy together with small photos of his Mama making Art with him. Perhaps it was the spirit of a Art Mama who summoned the hail that fell ferociously on the opening day of the exhibition. Rain cascaded down streets and created waterfalls in the thunder and lightening. This weather shook the hills around the seaside town and threatened to rain off lunch for self defined Arty Grandmothers scheduled for that afternoon. Despite these conditions the intrepid and curious did arrive, they proceeded to first make an installation by collectively emptying out handbags much to the amusement of the staff. The hotel had seen all types of intoxication and bad behaviour but this was something new. In the iconic Grand Burstin Hotel Tatsumi Orimoto explained to those assembled Grandmothers that all of the women in the famous tyre portraits were gone, it was a simple statement of mortality easily forgotten after the first course. By the end of the lunch the guests were singing the White Cliffs Of Dover and a raucous and poignant Victorian ditty called She Was Poor But She Was Honest (It's the Same the Whole World Over) a lyrical tale about the misfortunes of a woman in a world dominated by pimps and aristocrats. |