CHANGING TIMES: STRANDED ASSETS
Reimagining The Nature Of Odate
Russell A. Beard
Odate, Akita Japan 2018
This is the the result of a six week residency in Akita, Japan As part of the Robert Callendar International Residency for Young Artists in association with Zerodaté and Latteral Lab in the UK.
1. “Population Record” and The Illusion of Progress, Linear Time and Perceived Duration
80cm/30cm, salvaged steel & found Objects, 2018
The artist has created an assemblage of three found objects in which Time is the unifying principal. Suggestive of a record player, oscillating sound-waves or an incendiary fuse (referencing japan’s “ticking demographic time-bomb”) the piece traces the history (and projected future) of population-decline in Akita from 1940 (when the disc was recorded) until 2040. The vintage record (salvaged from a heap of 'stranded assets' outside one of the many abandoned stores on Odate's high street) is badly warped from exposure to the elements and makes reference to the deep insight of St Augustine who recognised that the way we hear and perceive music can be a useful to understand how it is only in our minds - through cognitive processes of memory and anticipation that the lived experience of time-as-duration is created. In this sense time-lines are a kind of construct which can act like a cognitive yoke - trapping us in outmoded thought and behaviour patterns. Duration may be illusory but there is change - irreversible thermodynamic processes, a directionality perceived as the passage of time in our lived experience of the world, as seen in the ceaseless and irreversible tendency of matter to increase in complexity and disorder . This entropic 'arrow of time' is expressed in the oxidisation of these corrugated iron sheets and is in a sense 'real time' an erupting present - a place of perpetual becoming from where we might remember the way things were and imagine how they might become
190cm-3cm, salvaged corrugated iron, and Iron Oxide, 2018
Entropy from Greek work meaning “transformation”, also known as “the arrow of time”, is the irreversible fundamental physical law that without energy input energy and matter will disperse from order to disorder.
This series of corrugated sheets contain the same element that we depend on for survival that colours our blood and circulates oxygen around our bodies. It was found in the wreckage of a ruined timber-yard in Odate. In seven days time it will be replaced exactly where it was found where physical, chemical and biological processes return the iron to the soil. Appreciating these artefacts not as objects but as a set of elements in perpetual processes expands our temporal horisons connecting us to geological time and inviting us to reflect on the perpetually transient nature of existence
30cm/30cm, salvaged steel, 2018
This is a working model with which the artist is attempting to faithfully represent the phenomenological present and the cyclical-nature of materiality
4. “Prised Plants” or “Mobile”
The artist combines a found object and a plant carefully prised from between from the paving slabs on Odate High Street in an abstract arrangement symbolising the radical social and economic change that is underway.
Car-centred commercial development is expanding in a ring around the edge of the city, leaving the growing proportion of city centre properties, vacant, and socio-economically deprived. The land may appear “abandoned” but it is far from “uninhabited”. A new other-than-human community is emerging from amid the ruin creating expanding networks of entangled life-worlds. A profusion of Pioneer plants and fungi are colonising the dormant industrial sites and taking residence in the vacant properties, restoring soils, decontaminating land, and creating habitat for other non-human animals.
5. “マゲワッパMobius (Loop in Four Dimensions)
30cm /250cm / 2mm Plantation cedar wood, Kakishibu, charcoal, 2018
This large Mobius loop has been created from a single strip of plantation cedar formed using ancient technique of wood-bending or “Magewappa” particular to Odate. By painting the single surface in steady transition from charcoal black to the traditional red “Kakishibu” paint made from green persimmons that darkens with age, the Mobius is a kind of kinetic sculpture transforming in time and reminds us that fire, disturbance and disorder are not ends in themselves but are essential components for a dynamic ecology and an integral part of evolution.
6. “Stranded assets” or “Mottainai Representing ‘Sense of place’ ”
14 x 10cm /10cm sections of waste plantation cedar, charcoal kakishibu A4 printed Place-Standard survey and clipboard, 2018
The artist conducted a survey developed in Scotland Called the “Place Standard” with Odate residents from seven demographics to get a sense of how they felt about their city. The results are averaged and arranged vertically with youngest at the top and seniors at the bottom. The black on white verticality referencing Japanese traditional calligraphy while the shapes in the center caused by burning the wood references the practice of sho-sugi-ban and holds the codified survey results - joined with the clip board on the wall - with key and questions allowing the viewer to get an impression of how people of different ages and genders feel about their place.
This could be a useful starting point for a wider study that could lead to a more productive dialogue and help identify priorities for improvement of the city to make Odate a better place to live, work and be happy.
The Japanese concept “Mottonaiai” or “too good to waste” is appropriate for this piece. The wood is sourced from the miles of Akita Cedar trees surrounding the town. At first look like healthy forest ecosystems but are infact ecologically barren plantations. These profoundly capitalist environments are no longer managed or harvested for timber and have become obsolete due to change in global economy. Known as “stranded assets” these dense ceder plantations are economically and ecologically unproductive and have more in common with industrial wastelands (indeed the pollen is known to cause respitiroy problems forcing many inhabitants to wear breathing masks associated with air pollution) while ironically the ‘waste-lands’ of the many abandoned coal mines, timber yards and shopping centers have become unofficial nature reserves. Far from ‘vacant’ these ex industrial sites are infact ecologically thriving ‘hot spots’ of diversity whereby the invasive “weeds” are in the process of healing the land.
Artists - like these new opportunistic inhabitants are capable of thriving on disturbed land and rejuvenating dilapidated or degraded landscapes . Like the weeds growing though the broken and polluted soils – artists have an important job to do - not simply noticing things but actively helping re-form and revitalise our environment physically and culturally – identifying not just the way things are - but the way things are going before actively tapping into that trajectory - finding the line and ‘taking it for a walk’
