Video Shakkei: Post-Performance Drawings

‘If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object … I can also – though in no way claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse) – isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed by linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan.’
– Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs

For our final exhibition we constructed an installation comprised of the video composites relating to our fourteen spatial performances, drawings, objects and text. Our aim was to create an imaginary landscape modelled on the aesthetic of the landscape gardens that we encountered and engaged with on our trip to Japan. Sugarcubes. Rocks. Bricks. Wire. Mirror. Lead. Each of these elements became signs in the system we called ‘our Japan’ -- a system based on the following features:

+ Eki – The art of locating through Geomancy
+ Shimenawa 標縄– Bound Territory / Sacred Space
+ Haiku 俳句 – Poetic form
+ Engawa 縁側 – Transitional space
+ Shakkei 借景 – Borrowed scenery