Page 91 - 50.La Biennale di Venezia issue of World of Art Magazine

ARATA ISOZAKI

ELECTRIC LABYRINTH

CASTELLO DI RIVOLI
MUSEO D’ARTE CONTEMPORANEA

APRIL 16 - AUGUST 24, 2003
CURATED BY HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Triennale exhibit. I was given some space to create an environment, so structure on the ruins, which I titled The City of the Future is the Ruins. I
I asked several artist friends to work with me. One is a graphic artist, was very much obsessed by these ruins of the future. I projected many
KOhei Sugiura - one of the best, most creative graphic artists we’ve had images of the future city onto the wall. At the time, we didn’t have any
in Japan since the war. Another is a photographer, ShOmei TOmatzu. kind of video system, just slide projectors with maybe five carrousels
And I invited a composer, Toshi Itchiyanagi, and asked him to create with eighty slides each, which meant a lot of images running through the
a kind of sound installation. My idea was to create twelve, very large projectors. We tried to show how the future city would itself constantly
curved panels covered with an aluminium surface on which numerous fall into ruin. This was on the moving panels, which, whenever they
images were silk-screened. I chose from ukiyo-e prints about ghosts turned, would be accompanied by Toshi Itchiyanagi’s strange sounds.
and terrible tragedies, and asked TOmatzu to find documentary stills It was an odd feeling to hear them. I called the installation Electric
about the atom bombs, rather than to use his own work. So, he brought Labyrinths”.
a film and some pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One famous one The installation has been reconstructed with the support of Castello
is of a kind of shadow made on a wall at the time the bomb exploded. di Rivoli, ZKM I Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechriologie, Karlsruhe,
These were the images I put on the panels, which also moved anytime the Fundaçao Serralves, Porto and under the curatorial leadership
anyone passed through an invisible infra-red beam. of Hans Ulrich Obrist. Electric Labyrinth represents one of the most
They would turn and suddenly you would see a ghost or a dead body, important chapters in interdisciplinary experimentation in the 1960s,
which completely involved you in the movement of these strange within the context of a dialogue involving art, architecture, and music,
images. They almost all had to do with the tragedy of the war or the and it proposes a direct engagement in themes such as war and social
crisis in society. At the same time, there were also large walls, ten crisis.As Hans Ulrich Obrist writes: “Isozaki’s installation proposes a
meters long and five meters high, very large walls, on which I made negotiation of and between different elements, which frame a world
a kind of collage about the ruins of Hiroshima and the megastructure beyond the wars of images and the wars of disciplines, and encourage
it would later become, which itself was in a state of ruin: a ruined the viewers to look for other properties of images”.

AR ATA ISOZAKI
ELECTRIC L ABYRINTH
1968 / 2002,
© AR ATA ISOZ AKI &
ASSOCIATES, JAPAN
COURTESY ZKM,
K ARLSRUHE

WORLD of ART 91