English script for “Shape of Memento” is updated.

Shape of Memento -between Nature and Artificiality

People live their lives comparing the sight seen in front of them with their own memories. “Memories” are symbols of each person’s background, and this background has affects on their way of thought or lives.
The environment where they grew up is the place where the seed of “memories” is formed. As children grew in cities, their original scenery should be the urban landscape. On the other hand, as they grew in countryside near forest, it’d be the Urlandschaft landscape, which can tell them how wild lives are greater than human beings. This gap must dictate someone’s thinking such as what the nature is or what human beings are. Anyone with each seed of “memories” will get older and enter the real world. Of course through this process “memories” would keep increasing and make their layers. These layers are piled on older ones like annual tree rings, and they get thick and bare new images. Ones go and come repeatedly among these layers of “memories” in order to try to grasp the scenery in front of them. This act is like one fulfilled with sounds and lights as if swimming through the long long story movie.

One of the BAUM members, OKU, has a background like mentioned above, “grew in countryside near forest.” Landscapes that we, humans deal with the Nature and finally found skyscrapers. On this point we might see the way of our existence like which men tried governing the nature completely through our history. The hugeness of metropolis and the speed of development surprise him, though he surely put the question to human beings as it is in his taking urban landscapes.
On the other side, although KANDA has a similar background, he has been taking pictures of countrysides. His photographs tell us the nature is not a object to conquer but a kind of neighbourhoods to take hands each other. In the natural view among wild lives we live, people spend their time as if we were mingled in nature— this shiny scene can be called one of the original scenery of happiness.
And SAITO was born in Kanagawa very near from A big city, Yokohama, and drifted around small towns in between the metropolis and the countryside. He shows us a unique distance between human and nature. Towns declining in prosperity and woods flourish among the spaces with their leaves and branches. The photographs might show us the difficulties to keep the balance between them.
Thus the scenes born as shapes of “memories” let us notice their seeds.

Though views from the train window are indifferent to most people, they form layers at the depth of one’s mind. YAMAICHI puts these layers over another repeatedly, to make beholders move around the spaces between metropolis and countryside. He puts cities, woods or outskirts farther away as if he’d rejected anyone to trace back his seed of “memories.”
And the skin of trees, KOSUDA put photolayers over another repeatedly, gives us an experience to face trees as a shape of the nature. His method to figure out trees as a object and keep in mind tells us his attitude that he puts the nature outside of human’s frameworks. The appearance, which we can see when we close at the utmost limit, might be this shape.
Exactly it has quite different appearances, that between the city for people who grew up in big cities and one for those who did in outskirts. Of course on opposite matters the same aspect can seem. This exhibition “Baum! vol.00” began from the experiment of trials to visualize “memories” and their layers that decide the direction of thoughts as mentioned above. To try to grasp everything – sounds flooding in their surroundings, time running around them and neighborhoods or scenery in front of them-, the “memories” appear with their shapes in photography.


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