Events

  • Finished

Drawing a map of the project "The town is an art museum for everyone"

New ways of looking at a town

Genre:
  • Art Project ,
  • Exhibition / Screening

We will hold an activity report and exhibition for this year’s Koganei Artfull Action! (Koganei City Art Culture Promotion Plan). Have a look at the various practices that emerged throughout the community!


Connecting personal memories to the minutiae of town life.
Using the five senses to their full capacity to “feel” the town.
Minor reinvention and transformation of familiar landscapes for playtime.
Getting creative with people who live in the same town but who you never had the chance to mix with….
When we took a fresh look at the town using different ideas and methods than usual, we made discoveries and found connections between people which we had missed until now. When these were sorted and put together, the result was a map that spread all over tow

2017 Koganei Artfull Action! practices

“Koganei and I: Secret Expression: Recall Field Trip” civic tours
Guest director: Wataru Asada
This project was all about using artistic expression to look at the town where you live and everyday life there from a different perspective than usual, and to come up with your own unique form of creative expression. The theme for the third year of the “Koganei and I: Secret Expression” project was the “Recall Field Trip”. Set in every corner of the community, these excursions were held over the course of three days. There was the “Nohara-kun” mobile street stall and the “evening recall field trip” dispatched to the nights streets of Koganei; the “big recall field trip” group tour in which participants brought a cherished item they had always owned or something they could never bring themselves to throw away, and then talked about the item as they walked around town; and the “recall field trip collection” of jaunts to 13 citywide locations, devised by townspeople who took part in the project and based on recollections of the town and its individuals. “Recall field trips” leading to the future are sure to continue on in local daily life.


Koganei Daiyon Elementary School 5th graders
“Let’s try and remember without looking”

Artist: Arthur Huang
Artist Arthur Huang, whose work is themed around what he calls “Memory Walks”, was invited to the school to hold a workshop in which the children were asked to leave behind their usual unconscious reliance on vision, go around the campus for a sensorial experience of sound, smell and color, and then express their memories of the experience in color and form. While the children were confused by the experience of expressing what they felt in an abstract form, they did go on to develop concepts in groups and as individuals. By the last session they were freely and fully able to enjoy expressing themselves through art.


Midori Elementary School 4th graders
“Creating landscapes in the forest”

Using the nearby Yokuonkan forest as their canvas, the children had to create their own new landscapes. They divided into groups, played in the forest to get some ideas going, and then started on production, using natural materials like pruned branches and hemp rope. Within a limited amount of time the students worked on their creations, coming up against materials that wouldn’t do what they wanted, wondering how to give form to their artistic images, swapping ideas with their fellow classmates and occasionally clashing with each other. On the final day the children crafted their own landscapes in the forest and then expanded their imagination playing to their heart’s content.


“Recall field trip” workshop: Honcho Elementary school edition
Honcho Elementary School 6th graders
“Trace and follow the old school routes”

Guest director: Wataru Asada
What can you see when you take a fresh look at the route you take to school every day? Children using the same school route traced back the paths they took for six years, and created a huge map. Then with new eyes, they tried walking the school routes of friends which they themselves never use. Many aspects of the routes emerged which they would normally miss. The workshop also included interviews with children’s parents and guardians recollecting their own school routes. Looking at all these old school routes gives rise to a sense of the town and of ourselves as we are now, and of our present.


The town is an art museum for everyone: Kagawa Kobo Edition
Unique and original artworks created by attendees at Kagawa Kobo, a Koganei day center enterprise providing daily living skills for people with disabilities, were put on show in an exhibition devised by fellow townspeople. Along with the exhibition was the Updated Art Museum installation “Let’s make a town with everyone at Kagawa Kobo!”. This involved visitors painting on additional elements to a picture of the town, resulting in the “town” being updated on a daily basis. Another initiative was a symposium (with artist Tomoki Watanabe as guest) on the theme of people in the community enjoying expressing themselves artistically to an even greater extent in their daily lives. In this symposium we shared with the townspeople our belief that age and gender, not to mention the state of being disabled or not, are irrelevant to the joy and pleasure of expression.


Hi-Blood Pressure Exhibition

Curator Karol Kaczorowski
All the works produced for this exhibition were based on a workshop between Polish artists and local residents. This project was also experimental and diverse in method, involving workshops and art appreciation classes at elementary schools, installation from materials brought in by citizens, and collaborative work with distant artists. The media used may have differed, but all the works gave a sense that art is something holding a prominent place in daily life with a role to play in connecting people.

Admission

Free

Contact

Artfull Action NPO
TEL: 050-3627-9531
E-mail: mail@artfullaction.net

Venues

Koganei Miyajigakki Hall (Koganei Civic Center)
Civic Gallery and Multi-purpose Space B

Credit

Organized by
Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Koganei City, Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture), Artfull Action NPO
Assisted by
Japan Foundation for Regional Art-Activities, Agency for Cultural Affairs
Produced by
Artfull Action NPO