863943689Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art Special Exhibition
"Visionaries: Making Another Perspective"

TAKT PROJECT participated in the special exhibition "Visionaries: Making Another Perspective" at the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art.
This exhibition curated and supervised by Ms. Kawakami Noriko, who has been contemplating design at the core of her practice, this exhibition featured twenty up-and-coming artists (individuals and collectives) working in art and design who are developing remarkable activities in Japan through flexible approaches that are attentive to the history of humans and the earth.
TAKT PROJECT was presented three works. In addition to "glow ⇄ grow: globe," which was being used as the announcement visual for the exhibition, also presented "black blank," the latest work from our independent research project. We ware also exhibited our research that forms the basis of "black blank," a self-driven tour of various places in Tohoku, in the form of "Field notes: Tohoku Research."


＜Exhibited works＞

black blank

Making life more convenient… I feel as if we have passed the critical point for this design objective.

While we can look up the weather in the palm of our hand, it seems as if we have thrown away
the ability to identify the weather with our bodies by looking into the sky, feeling the temperature, and smelling. And technology may have closed off a human ability as a result.

While going around the Tohoku region, I came across a special method of creation by Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933, Japanese writer / poet). Miyazawa would go outside, taking a pen and paper with him, and write things down as if making sketches. He described these as “mental imagery… that I received from the woods and fields and… rainbows and moonlight.”* It was the stimulation of all his physical senses that caused this mental imagery to spin out within him… So thought Miyazawa.

I want to redefine the purpose of design as not solely to “give,” but to “draw out” creativity.
Can it elicit artifacts and human imagination, as the natural world did for Miyazawa?
This work is an atavistic experiment in design with the sole objective of evoking a variety of “mental imagery” in its audience.

Yoshiizumi Satoshi

*Miyazawa Kenji, Preface, The Restaurant of Many Orders, 1924.



Field notes: Tohoku Research

I feel that as the city sharpened up, becoming ultra-modern, I failed to notice ʻsomethingʼ falling off in the process. This ʻsomethingʼ itself may be the clue to confronting the various problems that we now face.

Driven by this presentiment, I'm conducting fieldwork in the Tohoku region to search for clues to this ʻsomethingʼ that has fallen off. The reason I chose Tohoku as our research site is because Tohoku has a harsh natural environment, including heavy snow in winter, and its own particular culture as a marginal place. However, this field project is not driven by a facile binary opposition between city and nature, or the center and the periphery, nor is it nostalgia; neither does it involve revering or glorifying Tohoku as an actual embodiment. It aims to rediscover the possibilities of perception focused on the natural world, which the people of Tohoku originally possessed, and to reconsider the approach that design should take.

Yoshiizumi Satoshi


glow ⇄ grow: globe