Scanning Osaka

THE RE-ARTICULATION OF A PUBLIC SPACE (An IMI-AIR Project)

The project 'Scanning Osaka' was part of the Art in Residence project (AIR) at the Inter Medium Institute Graduate School in Osaka (IMI) - DECEMBER 1997.

The project seeks to question the architectural and urban planning of the city of Osaka and its public spaces. The project which scans the city of Osaka is carried out through two main concepts conceived and developed by two IMI students: Manabu Miki's 'The Osaka Loop Line Project' and Midori Komatsubara's 'The End of The New Towns'.

'Scanning Osaka' has been further developed through the work of a team of researchers, artists, students, organizers, invited foreign lecturers and others who have all contributed to the creation of an inter-communicative dialogue.

Both projects deal with the important issue of finding, detecting and re-interpreting those monuments and buildings of Osaka which hide and cover or simply present and represent a duality of full-empty space, social-psychological space and real-virtual space. Both projects seek to question the concept of public space as a highly political topos, content and form.

I was almost an eye witness to this inner process of articulation concerning the past and present of a new generation of future Japanese and Japanese / Korean artists and intellectuals who want to detect and make visible the existential social power structures of proper lives and works.

Osaka Loop Line Project

The Osaka Loop Line Project conceived by Manabu Miki tries in the first place to detect how specifically selected objects and monuments in the city of Osaka are connected with the political and economic power of the city. Moreover the most important achievements of the project can be summarized as follows:

1. As a way to question why the city of Osaka (as with most of the Japanese cities) lacks a public space or rather it is better to say has no real space that can function as a public sphere, as a res publica - as a matter of public importance.
2. To ask how specific monuments and buildings in Osaka are functioning as dislocated monuments and spaces.
3. To question their function in the structure of the city and in the power structures of the open spaces of urban Osaka.

There are various lines of interpretations on the Osaka Loop Line Project. These have tried to establish the following interactions and possibly dangerous connections, dualities and meaning of spaces and monuments in Osaka city:

Osaka City Hall - Nakanoshima Kokaido
The Twin 21 Tower - Osaka Castle
Osaka Castle - the Municipal Museum
Naniwano-Miya

Each of these sites, places or monuments in the complex structure of Osaka hide, incorporate or integrate the so-called dislocated counterpart, that can be regarded as one of the following:

1. A fake - the Nakanoshima Kokaido being a copy or a transposition of the neo - classical American or European architectural style into the Osaka town scenery, which includes a lot of dramatic interpersonal stories.
2. A meta-stabile double - the castle of Osaka is a dislocated signifier of the Twin 21 Tower buildings. The castle in relation to the Twin Buildings has created an excessive tourist attraction which hides or covers the economic power of the Twin 21 Tower.
3. A void - Nanivano-Miya is the void park space in the centre of Osaka.

These three paradigms or models of space - the fake, the meta-stabile double and the void are not simply metaphors of space but function as generators and transformers of the city space, coding it or making visible-unvisible its different histories, memories and identities.

The End of The New Towns

Midori Komatsubara's precise presentation of the structures of the Japanese New Town resembles more and more the structures of the new cemeteries which has doubled the void of meaning that is already detected in the Japanese urban landscape.

The landscape of the New Town is similar to the one of the new cemetery. Komatsubara has shown that the new cemeteries are as regulated today as "towns", and that the dramatically ageing New Town Communities function as a well organized cemeteries!

The void mirrors the loss of memories and the completely un-integrated social human structures in the new town enclaves which changes them into traumatized ghosts. They are the symptom of an anti-community. The End of the New Town ghost model will lead to the beginning of the articulation of memories and different histories.

Osaka is a body of a city constructed from layers of fakes that function through the simulation of the most superficial and kitschy stereotypes of what can be perceived as Western European shopping streets and architecture, North American amusement parks etc. All these fakes stand tightly near one another in the city space, overlapping and blending into one another, without borders, without edges and without shapes. Fakes onto fakes: the French Eiffel Tower, the American Statue of Liberty and models of American suburban housing, etc.

The research team came to the conclusion that even what is perceived as an image of Japan is a fake image of what is already lost, but is today constantly reproduced through fakes. The kitschy abundance of the fake 'mise-en-scene', cover the traumatic reality of the Osakan urban structure and it's lack of a public space. The fakes fill the traumatic void of the real space, the one without public zones.

To cut through these traumatic voids of the real space without public zones the IMI-AIR research team carried out the following:

1. TRANSFORMED the IMI - Inter Medium Institute Graduate School DORMITORY KITCHEN/ROOMS IN A PUBLIC SPACE. Through sitting around the kitchen table and eating and drinking we started a series of talks where the participants exchanged opinions and information through discussions about art, culture and public/private space. In this manner the dormitory kitchen became a more utilised public space.
2. In the completely artifical and dislocated space of Osaka, the IMI' students managed to get a real space (which they named GPOD - Green Pocket on the Dislocation) situated in Osaka. GPOD will be seen as a space of historical importance if it manages to create, in the near future an alternative cultural space with planned activities and content. It would be the first such place in Osaka and the one which will almost physically re-locate the structure, the model and the paradigm of a public space into Osaka's real urban structure.

The IMI AIR 'Scanning Osaka' project showed that a new generation of artists, writers and activists in Japan have a clear concept of how to initiate a critical relocation of the dislocated urban space.

The articulation of the dislocated space in Osaka, through two clearly elaborated art projects, is a first step towards a critical interpretation of the environment of Osaka - urban, mental and historical. The aim is to re-form a new public space and relocate history and memory.

Last but not least the project has been involved in creating a real public space in Osaka.

IMI AIR projects online