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invigilator: tokyo

more people; affecting more space

probably the most difficult thing about the event was trying to find an equivalent for “invigilator” in Japanese. We trawled the dictionary but so many watching/guardian type words seem to come with a lot of baggage through association with being told what to do by a person of higher rank. Nothing seemed to have the feeling of benevolence we wanted.

We invigilator

In the end we settled for “kizuiteimasu” - I am noticing/aware of things.

Whilst waiting for invigilator #3 at the station we realised we could be using the time as an aquivalent to the 30 mins delay I experienced on my way to work. (incidentally, we did our invigilation in the evening - taking into account the time differences we reckoned we’d be starting out at about the same time as I would bnormally leave home…)

Rather than just hanging around we put up our signs and started invigilating.

lumine

delay

delay

Many people swerved to read our signs announcing that we were noting varous things in the area, not many went so far as to make eye contact. When they did we smiled and wished them a good evening.

After meeting our third team member we moved on to Nishi-Shinjuku to find a good starting point. We selected a huge office block building (I think it was an insurance company) where we found a doorway with a stream of office workers leaving (at that time it was probably about 8 pm)

….to be continued next time I go to an internet cafe - time’s up for now…

room with a view

found an interesting view from my ryokan room after all…

japanese garden

asakusa

For the last few days I’ve been staying in a ryokan in Asakusa: somewhere my friends tell me is very old style Japan.

I don’t think much of the view from my room.

window

However, on the plus side I’m about 20 seconds’ walk from Kaminari dori and Sensoji temple. I battled the crowds on Sunday morning, but by far prefer the place at night when it has room to breathe.

sensoji

hozomon gate

gate

silhouette

buddha

yaribi

After some serious Googling for artist-led projects in and around Tokyo, I ended up following a link to the Yaribi gallery. As is often the case in these situations, I’m following a link from an English-language site to a Japanese one, so I tend to get most of my information from the link rather than the site itself. In this case:

Yaribi is a little wooden hut constructed illegally on the roof of the painting department of Tama University by a number of students. They organise exhibitions in it. …The structure will stay on the roof for a while, and has the support of a number of professors. I suggested they perhaps involve curating and critical studies students as well as artists, to try create a broader public platform. Anyway, it is wonderful to see such initiatives in the normally rather quiet and reserved spaces of art schools.

All the universities here are just closing down for their Summer vacation so I thought I’d missed an opportunity to visit Yaribi, but fortunately they had two Open Campus days just at the time when I was staying at a friend’s house close by.

tamabi view

The campus is on a hillside on what I assume is the edge of Hashimoto. The buildings are that Eastern Asian concrete type of institutional architecture that I somehow simultaneously find quite uplifting but also incredibly bland. Hmmm.

painting east

Anyway, I finally tracked down the East painting building and the Yaribi rooftop.

Thanks to the language barrier again, I’m really not in a position to be able to say much about either the show or the organisational set-up but as far as I can make out there was previously a more ramshackle construction on the site that was made more solid in the early months of this year.

Thanks to some sheets of hardboard, some scaffolding, a website and a few judiciously placed tarpaulins, Yaribi seemed to me to be a really viable exhibition space. There are quite a large number of staff (a mix of current and graduated students?) and, judging from their website, a busy programme.

I’m really excited that something like this is happening, although I’m not really sure how autonomous it is and it’s still very much within the ‘safe zone’ of an art university (and probably within the students’ own department at that). I’d love to see more of this Outside, both in Japan and in Brum.

Could the use of scaffolding lend itself to a modular approach and a space that could be quite mobile? …or is it the semblance of something permanent that gives this project its strength?

yaribi

yaribi

wolf

scaffold

rear

front

inside1

inside2

sandwiched

Over the last week I’ve been able to cobble together a couple of fairly respectable sandwichboards that I intend to use to mark out an area under the watchful eye of a group invigilation.

It required an interesting combination of tools and materials from Meg’s studio and things like tweezers and a compass that I have in my rucksack.

sandwich

(just to put things to scale, the table is about a foot high…)

Finding people to work with for the invigilation is proving much more difficult so, for the time being, the boards remain blank and the red t-shirts un-worn.

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