In February 2005 the Stellwerk Zollverein e.V. again announced an international five months studio scholarship. The topic of this year´s announcement was: „Import-Export: an exchange of perspectives between Japan and Germany“. The expectation was to get aware of bilateral influences in terms of visual arts and culture of these two countries.

The jury procedure

On 10th of May 2005 a professional jury examined the applications. Two artists with good connections to Japan were present: Stefan Pietryga from Potsdam, who has a studio at Zollverein, as well as Christoph Platz from Bochum. Ulrich Stroeher, collector and chairman of the board of management of the foundation Zollverein, Roger Schimanski from the art gallery Heimeshoff in Essen and Andreas Dunkel from Stellwerk Zollverein e.V. completed the jury. Finally they came to the decision to invite the photo and installation artist Tatsuya Higuchi.

The scholarship holder – Tatsuya Higuchi

In 1972 Tatsuya Higuchi was born in Kanagawa (Japan). He completed his studies at the Tama University in Tokyo and lives in Yokohama. From 29th of June to 30th of November 2005 the artist has lived and worked in the Stellwerk building, a former railway control center on the Triple Z area.

Higuchi is represented by the Berlin art gallery Murata and friends. From 18th of November 2005 until 15th of January 2006 there could be seen an exhibition of recent works. From 14th of May to 25th of June 2006 the Wiesbaden Kunstverein will show an exhibition with the title „scent of no scent”.

The project

His Essen project has the title „Ordinary way of Ms. ... / Mr. ...“. By it, as in all his previous works, he reflects on aspects of temporalization and spacialization of human existence. Though he usually uses almost exclusively his own personal and physical relations as a starting point, here he enters consciously into a dialogue with other people:

„The ways and streets, which are usually used by the people, are sites which (…) evoke different memories and meanings (…). Another person living in the same time with me will have other thoughts than me, even if he sees the same landscape. I would try to show relations of persons to each other and to create an ability of imagination (...) with this project.“

Altogether 16 inhabitants, people of different origin, social class and age have followed the invitation of Higuchi, have shown a footpath or a driving route within the city of Essen to the artist and have explained him why this way is connected closely to their own life. But Higuchi´s photos do not illustrate these individual references, especially because the persons, who are realated to them, are not at all part of the image. Only concise bilingual photo subtitles, which are added equivalently to each photo sequence, make this coherence vaguely imaginable.

In his city portrait, which is based on multitudinous subjective mappings, Higuchi casually stylizes the ‘ordinary ways’ through Essen to imaginary spaces. Always using a constant camera angle, he manages to displace the passages as well from their everyday life’s references as from linear time structures. Together with the respective title information spaces and persons effectively melt into mental projection screens, which could be empathized by means of the spectator´s imagination.

This photo project is not spectacular, quite the contrary. It almost avoids to create meanings, to impress or to emotionalize by itself. However the Japanese succeeds in appreciating really different, seemingly ‚typical’ as well as ‚untypical’ paths of life in Essen, perhaps in order to raise them a humble monument, but in any case to enter in dialogue with them:

„Often it happens that our imagination of others is not sufficient although we are currently situated in a global development. Therefor in particular, I want to propose a project for the recovery of the imagination of others, who are living in the same age.“

The exhibition

An exhibition which took place from 29th of November to 18th of December 2005 in the Studio Pietryga at Zollverein, shaft XII, hall 12, also showed an installation of Higuchi´s always continued project „Boxed Sky“ in addition to the 15 parts of the Essen work series. These small light boxes emerge from photographs of the sky on sunny days, whereto the slides will be cut out and folded as small boxes.

Text and translation: Andreas Dunkel, Friederike Hengstermann

Photos: Tatsuya Higuchi, Stellwerk Zollverein