Our world is increasingly gripped by division and conflict, leaving what lies ahead unclear. Given these circumstances, what should we do so that people from different backgrounds and with divergent attitudes can compromise and coexist? The various changes ushered in during the COVID pandemic have accelerated social efficiency. But efficiency taken to excess gradually attenuates interpersonal relations. Aspiring to live together must start from sharing a place. We now need once again to consider the importance of learning from and acknowledging one another, of striving to understand each other over the course of time and dialogue.

Through the work and practices of four artists and groups, this exhibition explores the possibilities that unfold from people sharing a time and place, and engaging in dialogue. Koki Tanaka has long investigated what it means to live with others through projects that inquire into collaboration and communities. The exhibition includes Provisional Studies: Workshop #7 How To Live Together and Sharing the Unknown, which Tanaka first showed at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017. The work centers on footage documenting a nine-day workshop featuring local residents with different cultural backgrounds. The workshop was inspired by How to Live Together, a series of lectures that Roland Barthes gave at the Collège de France. Barthes identifies the possibilities of coexistence embedded in the concept of idiorrhythmy, a mode of living practiced by monasteries on Mount Athos in Greece, and which allows the monks to share the same space, yet still maintain their own individual rhythms. The workshop participants take part in various activities and discussions, overseen by several facilitators. Totaling more than four and a half hours, the footage conveys a sense of how difficult it is to live together. Is it actually possible to live with others? Watching the footage, the viewer once more confronts that question.

Architect Kumiko Inui, director of the joint project by five architecture firms to design the new Kyoto City University of Arts and Kyoto City Senior High School of Art campus, focuses on the little places encountered in everyday life or at work, the spots whose “designer” is unknown but which convey a sense of a living human warmth. She calls such places “small landscapes” and has documented them with collaborators through a voluminous number of photographs. In the small landscapes showcased in this exhibition, Inui finds daily learnings and the sources for something akin to the commons, for affection for place, for feelings of comfort, for shared sensations. In some, a commons appears and coexists within another commons. Commoning is this practice of creating temporary commons. Having accumulated such examples of everyday and local commons/commoning, Inui describes architecture not as something you make but which you put or place somewhere. That choice of verb encapsulates the thinking of a designer who regards architecture not as providing a space but as something that exists interrelationally with inhabitants, and in conjunction with the small landscapes that they create.

Yoshitaka Yazu and Tsuyoshi Yamada’s Byproducts Market is an artist collective that emerged from the research and development carried out for the new campus design. It treats the things destined to be thrown away like scrap materials from artistic production as “byproducts,” which it collects, utilizes, and sells. It is involved in various projects derived from these core activities, including the Arts Circulation Center, which aspires to circulate materials, and the Byproducts Orchestra Zombies, which performs with old musical instruments. In Exploring the Gap, Inui’s small landscapes “collaborate” and intermingle with the works of Byproducts Market, a deliberate blurring of exhibition areas that attempts to create new landscapes while examining what used to exist around the original materials as well as their uses, and allowing visitors to experience the circulation and utilization of byproducts.

A sculpture professor at KCUA’s Faculty of Fine Arts until the end of the previous academic year and appointed president of the university in April, Toru Koyamada has long explored the acquisition of shared or common spaces in his work. From a café where people casually gather like a house party taking place outside the home or a place where people come together around a small bonfire, such spaces create and cultivate dialogue and discussion. These are not “provided” places, but spaces beloved for bringing together different kinds of people, who make the spaces themselves without compromising their own rhythms. These too are examples of idiorrhythmic places of coexistence. For Exploring the Gap, Koyamada started by “placing” the hut-shaped sculpture work Floating Museum in the new campus. Playing a close yet changing role in the shared spaces Koyamada has made over the past roughly fifteen years, Floating Museum comprises restored and revived things that had served their purpose and were on the verge of becoming mere byproducts. On weekends during the exhibition, the venue will host the Weekend Café, a common space open to all to spend time in as they wish.

By opening up social interstices, shared spaces appear, and then through the people who gather in those places, social connections are formed. And temporarily being together constructs relationships in which we learn, acknowledge, and entrust things to others. What truly opens up the future and possibilities of living side by side is perhaps the accumulated, affectionate cultivation of those emergent common spaces in small landscapes.

(Translated by William Andrews)