Yoshinori Niwa
"Paying a Courtesy Call on the Incumbent Mayor by all His Predecessors in History"
In conjunction with Setouchi Triennale 2016, Miyanoura Gallery 6, which opened on Naoshima in 2013, will present a series of special exhibitions by various artists during the event called "Artists at Gallery 6: 2016." Through permanent works, related to the universal theme of "living well," Benesse Art Site Naoshima has provided visitors with an opportunity to consider various issues, such as the ever-changing present and the self. To deal more directly with the contemporary era, this series of exhibitions sets out to provide a diverse range of perspectives while encouraging viewers to engage with local residents through a variety of projects, including works and events, organized with three artists who visited Naoshima in 2015.
By interacting with society and public spaces, and turning these experiences into videos, Niwa Yoshinori, whose work will be shown during the summer period, upends our perception of things we usually take for granted, dismantles the contradictions within them, and presents new views of publicness and history. In his new work, The Incumbent Mayor Receives a Courtesy Call from all of His Predecessors, Niwa asked psychics and spirit mediums to call together all 16 of Naoshima's past mayors in order to pay a visit to the current mayor.
This attempt to collect the history of the island, separated from the mainland by the sea, began by engaging in discussions with the relatives of descendants of past mayors and spiritualists all over the country. Unlike a typical historical foundation, what emerges from Niwa's singular focus and direct approach is a history that would never arise from public records. We are also presented with a diverse range of human perceptions in regard to the memories and ideas of the deceased, which can no longer verified, the existence of spirits, and the actions of spirit mediums.
The media that currently links people grows ever more diverse, and today, various communities, which have carried on these links across time, are in the process of falling apart. How can we grasp the links between the past and present, and life and death? What are the cultural foundations of this archipelago, in which many different cultures and ideas have mixed together since ancient times? Is it possible to create a future based on context and culture? Niwa's experimental project, centering on the public figure of the mayor, contains these essential questions. It also asks what we ourselves think about the situation.
― Fukutake Foundation
To begin with, whether or not they are aware of it, everyone will have blood relatives, and without them, no one can exist in this world. In other words, everyone has ancestors. That is an unavoidable truth, at least, that's what we now think. And those many, many ancestors lived in this same world, or at least, what I believe to be the same world. And I have never met those many, many ancestors, as they left this world before I came to it. We exist here, in the world they once lived. The culture of bereaved relatives, who must remember their deceased, wishing for their souls to be at peace and turning to spiritualism, only ever existed in a private space, devoid of outsider opinion.
This project, Paying a Courtesy Call on the Incumbent Mayor by all His Predecessors in History, uses mediums and psychics from across Japan, and has them summon the ghosts of historic Naoshima mayors and village headsmen, in the Naoshima town hall. We also have an interview with the present mayor. The idea behind communicating with the dead came from the fact that anyone can access the written, official history of the island. Until now, summonings were only ever done by relatives remembering those they had lost. But rather than summoning private beings, this would be for public ones - mayors and village headsmen - and we ask them to pay us official visits from the spirit world. We will naturally be confused by what the mediums and psychics say. But with that confusion, we might be able to open a new door to access the world in which we live, more directly, by being more rash, by being less able to trust ourselves, and perhaps by not being so dependent on the culture and writings left by our ancestors.
When I went to visit an Itako (shaman) in Aomori to film for this project, I felt my fate sealed when the woman, who could barely see, said the following. "I'm a Itako, athough my eyes can't see, I know." she told us. What she was saying was, what can we, who assume our eyes can see, possibly know? One researcher explained that a necromancer's world is created from the assumption that the necromancer is "different from other people", but this doesn't necessarily apply to just necromancers. In the eras yet to come, with our changing sense of values and social landscape, how possible is it really, for us who assume our eyes can see, to reject our assumptions and truly look at world? This does not seem to be asked so vehemently.
― Yoshinori Niwa, Artist
