The curatorial project consists of transferring a post-war Japanese house, one of many in Japan that have outlived their usefulness and await demolition due to the country's declining population, to Venice, giving it a new existence in a different context. With the help of locals and craftsmen, the dismantled elements of the house have been reused as objects that furnish the garden of the Japan Pavilion, while the unused parts will be displayed inside it.
The deconstruction of the house will show several layers of renovations and extensions, showing how the current project is only one in a series of rewrites in the history of the house. Continuing this cycle, after the exhibition, the house will take a new trajectory as it is planned to be used as part of a community facility for the residents of an apartment complex on the outskirts of Oslo.
Description of project by La Biennale di Venezia
Your actions are not yours alone. Every action, however trivial, is the outcome of countless cumulative actions born of our relations with one another. So it is absurd to claim that our actions belongs solely to ourselves.
We are exhibiting a wooden house of a type that is extremely commonplace in Japan. One consequence of the country’s declining population—a harbinger for the rest of the world?—is a shockingly large number of houses that, having exceeded their life expectancy, simply await demolition. We are moving one such house to Venice to exhibit at this year’s Biennale.
Once in Venice, the house will not retain its original form. Having been dismantled to fit into containers for shipping, its various elements will find new uses at the exhibition: as display walls, as benches, as projection screens, and so on. Reassembling the fragmented house on-site into diverse configurations will give new life to these elements. However, many elements will inevitably be lost in the course of dismantling, shipping, and reassembling the house.
The architects and artisans from Japan who travel to Venice to revive and rebuild the house will compensate for its missing elements with new or locally obtained materials. The process will be shared via the Internet so as to pass the work on to successive teams of architects and artisans.
Though this collaboration may resemble cloud-based documentary film editing, it will be missing the concept of “completion”: the work is to continue for the duration of the exhibition. What we will be displaying here is the actual process by which multiple architects and artisans collaborate to produce a chimera-like installation that combines old and new materials in composite forms. The trajectories traced by the elements of this house will testify to the way our actions are part of a continuum: rooted in the past, linked to the future, and owned by all of us.
