木漏れ日 - Komorebi

(dappled sunlight)

2023

Repaired skylight, sunlight, hinoki scaffolding, soundscape by Sylvie Sema Glissant

 

For Komorebi, Raza initiated the repair of a skylight obscured by a broken panel for many years in the Mori Museum, Tokyo: a scaffolding was built of the traditional material of hinoki cypress, and the skylight fixed. The repair was blessed by a local Shinto shrine, celebrating the organic process of regeneration. For the duration of the exhibition, Our Ecology, the room’s artificial lighting will be kept off. Komorebi thus reintroduces sunlight, the basic metabolic fuel for most earthly life, to a space where it has been absent since the museum’s opening.

 

From sunset each day, Raza also includes VIVANT by Sylvie Séma Glissant, recorded in Martinique–near her home with the late poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant–and inspired by his phrase “"Rien n'est vrai tout est vivant" (“Nothing is true, everything is alive”). The sounds echo the ancient mangrove that occupied the landscape where Tokyo is today. While the hinoki cypress logs will return to the temple scaffolding company to be used again, Komorebi does not end with the exhibition; henceforth the skylight is permanently able to open.