bad places: crimes against the imaginary, where potentialities are forced 'to exist at the limits of the earth, in other words in mud' …(Bataille, The Notion of Expenditure)
1] 01.01.2019 prospecting for the unmarked disposal site of the bodies of Ōsugi Sakae 大杉 栄, Noe Itō 伊藤 野枝 and his 6 year old nephew Tachibana Munekazu の橘 宗一, after their murder on September 16, 1923, said to be dumped in an old well somewhere in the grounds of the former Kenpeitai HQ 憲兵隊, Ōtemachi 大手町, Tokyo.
In 1998 Noi Sawaragi 椹木 野衣 wrote in Japan/Modernity/Art 日本・現代・美術 how Japan was a 'bad place' 「悪い場所」 and not only for 'critical art production', but culturally because it is a place of repetition and forgetting - when problems happen they provoke outcries which are then forgotten until the next time, but not as if nothing happened rather as if nothing sticks or accumulates, however often repeated.1) In such conditions critical art cannot take root. 03.11 put all of this in sharp relief where the postwar forgetting that a Japan dependent on nuclear power was also built on top of a landmass that constantly shakes to which art was unable to respond. Once shaken cracks in this culture of forgetting produce a semblance of shame that registers acute dissatisfaction with the past and an openness to the present's encrypted futures - sometimes these cracks can provoke collaborative acts of narrative disturbance that sometimes connect with some of the ever-present strands of dissent in Japan.
