Englisch
Pieces of Memory, Tower of Babel, and an Imaginary Egg Mariko Mikami
"Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity." Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (*1)
In a residential suburban district of Colongne, within a bank of the Rhine River, a small tower with a unique exterior wall made of cobbled stones suddenly appears. The Zündorf Fortress Museum stands distinctly, 20 meters high and 8 meters wide with a small triangular roof. As the name implies, the structure was originally built in the 12th to 13th century as a stronghold when Germany was an entity of about 300 tiny territories at the time of its construction, and borders were defined in small increments, necessitating the erection of defensive towers to keep foreign enemies at a distance. Such historical memory of the building is reflected in the sparse and narrow windows. Transformed into an exhibition space, the building was renovated by Gottfried Böhm and opened as a branch of the Cologne City Museum in 1980. However, due to financial difficulties, the collection exhibition was removed in 1999. Today, with the support of the Friends of the Museum, the cultural institution actively hosts exhibitions by contemporary artists as well as musical events.
Satomi Edo's solo show Fragmented Utopia is being held at this unique structure. Edo’s works embrace the numerous layers and ambiguities of identity, based on her own minority self-identification as a child, being born into a Christian family in Kyoto and the discomfort that occurred as a result of this awareness. Her conceptual yet skillfully executed works range from delicate drawings based on eggshell motifs, to homeless tents suspended from trees lit by light and installations that intervene within the entire structure of buildings. Throughout her works, her warm perspectives of the fragile state of physical, social, and spiritual uncertainty and ambivalence resonates in provocative and emotive ways. At the same time the works appear to have a sense of compassion for the small and formless, which dominant narratives often neglect. In this exhibition, Edo's series of works such as Phantom Architecture, City Map, and Black Hole are shown as if they were breathing together within the medieval tower. Edo's artistic aptitude shines through, with her sharp yet soft eyes and hands that resemble those of an architect and a nun.
A yellow light bulb and Central axis of the building
I stepped into the fortress tower through the dimure front door. Even though it was a cloudy day, the interior seemed exceptionally dim. The first thing that struck my sight was a bare yellow light bulb suspended from the ceiling. Captivated by the light source, I gazed up at the bulb and realized that — despite its modest size, the building has a vaulted ceiling to the top floor. As the title Central axis of the building mentions, this cable coming from the ceiling is located in the middle. A bright light source other than the bulb shined from above. The bare concrete stairs and minimalist rails were symmetrically duplicated around the stairwell. The mystical and brutal Böhm's renovation provided cold and inorganic feelings somehow reminiscent of a carceral structure. At the same time, there was a sense of relief in the tention, as if the light of a naked bulb by Edo brought the former Middle Age fortress tower back to life.
City Map
Ascending a staircase along a massive internal wall firmly embedded in white plaster, I arrived on the first landing to find a work of mono-colored paper in a bright blue gray tint. Nothing was depicted on the slightly thickened paper except for horizontal and vertical paper folds, which stood out on the unfolded paper. Another body of monochrome paper works were displayed in the glass cabinet that followed. The works ranged from tiny folded pieces to bigger pieces that had been extended to reveal the folds.
The title of this series, City Map, did not print a map as might traditionally be navigated. However, the folds and the size of the map may be the reason for a sense of déjà vu, as it’s the same size as a city map that everyone who has ever gone on a sightseeing expedition has seen at least once. Edo was inspired to focus on the map's folds after cycling across a natural reserve with an open city map during her artist-in-residence in Nettetal. Map folding methods include the Miura fold, which was designed by Koryo Miura, an aeronautical expert, and the turkish fold, which allows the map to be opened with one hand. Edo’s maps do not provide information about where we are, where we are heading, or the general overview of the place. However, that doesn't mean it cannot help to navigate. It inspires us to venture into a fictitious metropolis with no beginning and no end.
The Black Hole and Phantom Architecture
Climbing the stairs further and arriving at the second landing, I found another staircase along the wall — perhaps a remnant of an old fortress tower, on which was displayed an unusual object that looked like a shiny black meteorite. A closer look revealed that it is composed of numerous layers of thin filaments, each having an indentation toward the inside. The inner side was hollowed out, resembling a floating base in space. The outside was uneven and awkward. This series, titled Black Hole, was made by scanning and printing eggshells with a 3D printer.
In the vitrine across from it, works of architecture entitled Phantom Architecture, which were drawn with a black pen on transparent, colorless glass plates and placed in a white frame. The series is based on the motif of buildings that were never actually built or do not exist anymore. There was no background depicted and the same drawing methods were applied throughout the entire series, the era and specific characteristics of the unbuilt architecture are homogenized. The white light shining from the top of the vitrine creates a somewhat futuristic and unrealistic impression, as if the works had been transported back in time from the fortress towers of the Middle Ages.
The Chicago Tribune Tower by Adolph Loos sits in the center of this vitrine. This architectural plan was submitted to the world's first architectural competition in 1922 for the headquarters of the Chicago Tribune, a significant newspaper in the Midwest U.S.A.. Loos' idea was an enlarged version of the Doric columns, with an exaggerated neo-classical style. When I looked carefully, I notice that instead of the bricks, stones, and tiles that made up the building's external walls, on Edo's work, the names and addresses of the locations where the structure was to be built are written and used to construct the walls of the letters. Each Phantom Architecture is made up of hundreds of black letters, much like Black Hole is made up of layers of the thin filaments. Closer attention revealed that the lettering on the left side of the building was legible, while those on the right half was mirrored: two sheets of glass were placed on top of each other, facing each other in parallel.
The hand written letters were sometimes too tiny or thin to be discernible letters, crafted meticulously as if they were bricked and piled up one by one. The characters were sometimes alphabetical, sometimes Cyrillic, sometimes Japanese, and sometimes Chinese: these are the languages of the countries where the structure was or was to be constructed. These letters contained no anecdotes or thoughts about the unbuilt structure, but merely the location's address as information. On the fifth landing, I found Frank Lloyd Wright's Mile High Illinois (1956), which envisioned a one-mile (1600 meter) skyscraper, four times the height of the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world at the time. Spanish architect Dávid Romero has recreated the unbuilt architecture using computer graphics, in collaboration with Frank Lloyd Wright's foundation. On the other hand, Edo’s skyscraper with repeatedly written strings of addresses and locations reminds us of the act of sutra copying.
The Phantom Architecture series includes works by Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, Bruno Taut, Étienne-Louis Boullée, Anish Kapoor, El Lissitzky, and others. They all have their own quirks and are sometimes criticized for their aggressive imaginations, but who were revolutionary architects of their time, both East and West, who pioneered their own era. However, Edo's work is more than just a celebration of historical architecture. This series began during the time of Germany's first shutdown in 2020 due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The prototype for these works is the 2016 Fragmented Memory series. At the time, the artist used glass to write memories of houses and structures she had lived in. The memories about home were not always something comfortable. Considering this production background, the Phantom Architecture also contains a sense of personal memories of the Covid-19 pandemic's solitary production, and of a building that does not always bring positive results. In the Kanji-speaking cultural sphere, books are traditionally written vertically, and the contents make sense when read from the right side, whereas in the alphabetic world, a story begins from the left side. The two layers of glass appear to depict Edo's multidimensional and multicultural nature as an artist in-between who has long lived and worked in an alphabetic culture yet still reads, thinks, and contemplates in Japanese.
Tower of Babel
Athanasius Kircher's Tower of Babel, which is presented in a vitrine on the third landing, is a new piece made for the exhibition in the Zündorf Fortress Tower. The Tower of Babel, as it is well known, is a world tower in which individuals communicated using one common language. However, God was enraged by this and deprived the common language to make mankind unable to speak with one another, causing them to abandon the construction of the Tower of Babel, resulting in the existence of numerous languages around the globe.
Originally a fiction of the imagination, the Tower of Babel has continued to fascinate subsequent generations and has been represented frequently in literature and visual art. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s well-known Tower of Babel is more reminiscent of the Colosseum than a tower, and its complex and bizarre leaning structure somehow becomes an unsettling and unrealistic atmosphere. On the other hand, Athanasius Kircher's Tower of Babel that Edo chose is simply a 23-story high tower reaching toward the sky. While Kircher seriously spells out the physical and economic impossibility of a tower that looks up to the heavens in the first place, he drew a picture of a tower that is not completely unrealistic, but somewhat feasible. If I climb the spiral staircase surrounding its outer wall, I could imagine the view from the top of the tower.
In Kafka's short fiction The City Coat of Arms (Das Stadtwappen in German), the failure to build the Tower of Babel is attributed to people's idleness and political condescension. Once the grand concept of constructing a tower reaching to the heavens is conceived, it does not vanish. People believe that when mankind's knowledge advances, construction will progress more rapidly and with better technology, hence construction is never begun. This lesson appears to reflect today's political scenario in terms of infrastructure and land. The Phantom Architecture also includes the World Trade Center in New York, which collapsed on September 11, 2001, and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which was crushed by the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. Edo clearly examines not only the aesthetic appealing form of architecture, but also the feature of architecture in society's collective memory, as well as the historical and geopolitical twists and turns that surround these gigantic constructions.
In this sense, Edo's Phantom Architecture might be viewed not as a liberal, pastoral utopia (Arcadia), nor a yearning for a past that could have been, but rather as a critique of Thomas More's utopia. More envisioned an inhumanly managed society that denied human individuality in exchange for equality, which is interpreted in the context of socialist and communist criticism. But in reality, with the massive architecture involving politics and its collapse, such as 9/11 and 3/11, the big story tends to dominate and the individual story is forgotten, and human individuality is indeed used as a political tool.
Entasis E-I II
The view grows clearer and the surroundings get brighter after wandering through multiple symmetrical staircases and landings. The trapezoidal vitrines I saw before are missing on this seventh landing. In its place was Entasis E-I II, a tower made of copper-colored wire and a butterfly egg that hangs from the ceiling. The modest tower has only a frame and is hollow, made of nothing more than reels around which welding wires are to be looped. This work provides the sense that the buildings in Phantom Architecture that we've seen thus far have truly burst out of the earth, although there is no address mentioned. The existence of an egg floating on top of the tower lends this work towards a more surreal appearance.
Edo's works contain many eggs and maps. In the iconic New Ground series, Edo peels a boiled egg on a plate and traces the accidental shape of the broken shell to create an imaginary map. The accidental egg shell shapes are enlarged, traced on a cutting sheet, and cut out by the artist. They are applied to a building's windows to produce a stained-glass-like spatial display. In addition, a workshop is being organized to build shapes out of boiled eggshells. Participants are given a boiled egg, instructed to face the shell on a plate, and then free to arrange the shells, each presenting what they think it looks like before eating the cooked egg together.
The eggshell map resembles a typical map rather than a City Map in this exhibition. However, it lacks national borders and does not exist as a continent — and of course, no national names are included. When I found myself comparing this imaginary map made from an eggshell to the maps that are currently in circulation, I realized how tame I have gotten in the modern nation-state system! This could be like ignoring Indigenous peoples, and saying "I discovered a new continent!" from a single point of view, evoking the violence of not knowing. Sharing with others at the workshop reveals the boundaries of my creativity and preconceptions.
The egg in Entasis E-I II is not cracked open to become a map, i.e., it is not turned into something that can be used as a material, but its being as an egg is highlighted. The egg is polished and shiny so that viewers can see themselves reflecting on its surface. The contour of the egg is precisely and beautifully curved, floating in the air atop a hollow tower. As if nature's form is the most imaginative of all man's architectural illusions. At the same time, however, such imagination of mankind can discover its perfect beautiness.
Gravity and Light
Finally, I arrived on the top floor landing, where a large blue city map makes its presence known. Although it is folded, I could imagine the gigantic paper as if spread out. Fluorescent lights line both sides of the map, providing a white glow that contrasts with the sunshine coming through the skylight. A cable is hanging from the ceiling paste and the yellow light bulb is dangling at the bottom floor. The egg of Entasis E-I II can be seen via a gap in the pedestal on which the map sits. This was the last piece of the exhibiton.
As I descended the stairs, I observed that the darkness grows with each step. I'm reminded of Simone Weil’s notes, Creation is composed of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace and the descending movement of the second degree of grace. (*2) It implies that creativity is an act of practice, tugging in conflicting directions and accepting the paradoxical nature of existence as it is. In the exhibition Fragmented Utopia, the egg hovering in midair represents a light ascent, whereas the bare yellow bulb at the end of the rope hanging down from the ceiling beam appears to represent a gravity-assisted descent. The yellow bulb, on the other hand, illuminates the gloomy ground floor, and when one looks up, a white light shines through the ceiling. Visitors ascend and descend between the egg on the top floor and the bulb on the ground floor in the fortress tower of Zündorf, like I did today and encounter phantom buildings and maps that do not exist. They move back and forth between imagination and reality, between images that appear and disappear in the special exhibition space. It is as if they are collecting fragments of memory, assembling an imaginary tower that will never be completed.
(*1) Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, translated by Arthur Wills, G.P.Putnam’s Sons: New York, 1952, p.45. (*2) op.cit., p.48.