Performance with video projection at the event WATCH YOUR STEP, MIND THE GAP at Fylkingen, Stockholm: Co-organized with Maipelo Gabang (August 2022)
Photo: Jonas Borg
Drawing, textile, and sound installation at the duo exhibition with Nils Ekman, OF PLANTS AND GHOSTS at Galleri NOS, Stockholm (September 2022)
Responding to the effects of Anthropocentrism in modern industrial society, Tsuchimoto unfolds the colonial notion of nature. Through filters of non-Western Other and vegetal beings, she reconfigures the historical narratives. She engages with the research subject by applying her critical and creative thoughts on the relationships and gaps between art, science, and epistemology. Bringing the interaction between human and nonhuman agencies to the forefront, the project aims to make our imagination open beyond nation-states and representations. In this project, she corresponds with her floral companion, hortensias, which have had their features and living transformed through botanical expeditions and human curiosity/desires.
Performance score:
The artist wearing coveralls slowly invites the audience to a space without chairs. There is a tin bucket and an apple crate on the stage under spotlights. As people are settling down on the floor, she starts removing different materials from the containers. The materials are both hard and soft, organic and synthetic giving the illusion of coziness. Their colors range between blue and pink, which don’t intend to represent anything associated with the human world. An act of touching is gradually becoming a rhythm and cycle, a routine and method, of organizing, gardening, and controlling. Before the movement turns repetitive or choreographed, it fades out and shifts to a video screening (link below). After that, the artist asks the audience to come closer to the center of the stage. She quietly suggests making origami flowers with distributed paper. The gestures become a desire, an instruction, and eventually production. It also whispers of the historical demonstration after the Fukushima disaster, despite the fact that its name is not well-recognized: the Hydrangea Revolution. The romantic ideas of flourishing together and our mirroring behaviors remain uncanny and ambiguous in the space while still keeping open and looking for connections, yet without knowing the end.
