This interaction between the insider and outsider is most eminent in the video we showcase at The Container, ANGELO LIVES (2014), a site-specific installation inspired by Yu Araki’s recent residency in Santander, Spain, summer 2013. The video, a montage of filmed footage from Spain, Italy, and Japan, along with historical images, paintings, and maps, is a mood board, slowly drawing you into a world of associations and connections. What starts with a formal representation – a tableau referencing Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), in a composition of longing and self-reflection, quickly departs into a most fictitious labyrinth of entwined allusions.
The original video, which was made and exhibited in Santander, in nine vignettes, corresponded to the expeditions’ texts of Vital Alsar (born 1933), an accomplished Santander explorer, whist referring also the nine chapters of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence (1966), the recounting of the story of Sebastião Rodrigues, a young missionary who was sent to Japan from Portugal in the 17th century, during the persecution of Christians in Edo Japan. The video built up a factitious relationship between the geo-political motives of religion and the spread of olive oil throughout the “new world.”
ANGELO LIVES, gives an opportunity to revisit the same narrative with proliferated abstraction, making a departure from the fictitious to the surreal. Narrating the video is an impression of Anjirō, or maybe his ghost, a Japanese convicted murderer who fled Japan to the Malaysian state Malacca in the 16th century, returning later back to Japan with Saint Francis Xavier and two additional Jesuits, as an interpreter, in what is documented as the first Jesuit mission to Japan.
This notion of personal interpretation is of strong interest to Araki and takes centre stage in his new video. Anjirō is a likely choice for a narrator, who despite being marginalized and seemably unstable, also understands the delicacy of interpretation all too well. His suggestion of using “Dainichi” to translate “God” to Buddhist monks (naming one of the Buddhists’ gods,) was replaced by Saint Francis Xavier to “Deusu” (Zeus), resulting in hostility from the monks.
The voiceover for the video includes a recitation of a transcript from the “Hidden Christians,” (Kakure Kirishitan, 隠れキリシタン), Japanese Christian converts who were persecuted until religious freedom was re-established in the mid-19th century after the Meiji Restoration. While in secrecy, in an effort not to leave any written documentation, the group orally communicated prayers, using Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese words, in “Chinese whispers” that turned the prayers with time intangible, gibberish. Nonetheless, the sounds still very much resemble a language, maybe Spanish, adding to the enigmatic and surreal air of the piece. Also in the voiceover is the Hidden Christians’ “Orasho” (Oratio), prayers that have been adapted to sound like Buddhists’ chants, again to avoid persecution, beautiful and full of yearning, they are played in video in reverse, and embellish the video with mysticism and longing, secrecy, and loneliness.
Pivotal to the video is also the preoccupation with olives and olive oil, and while Araki lessens his dependence on the parallels he forged before between exports of olive oil and the spread of Christianity to Asia, Australia, and the Americas, the olive tree and its fruit still take a symbolic role, exploiting long-established associations with culture, history, and religion. His treatment of the tree and olives in ANGELO LIVES, as a defining force in cultural identity, or heritage, brings to mind the video piece of the Palestinian artist Raafat Hattab, entitled Bidun Enwan, Untitled (2009), where the artist uses an olive tree to express longing, but also as a symbol of ethnicity.
Araki’s interest in the relationship between the camera, artist, and the viewer, brings experimentation and visual celebration. The concealment of the camera in his mouth, as he previously did also in his piece entrevoir (2013), is not anymore solely there to express theoretical or conceptual notion, but rather as a cinematographic opportunity. Over exposure of the footage and the framing of the screen through the mouth create wonderful compositions of abstraction and surreality, breaking the borders between the artist and the viewer. This experimentation is also manifested in the scenes taken through the glass jar, beautifully shifting between the men on the beach, the water, and the ever-present ubiquitous olives, a pair, rolling round and round, constrained by the squared dimensions of the background (which is stipulated by the shape of The Container itself).
More than all, ANGELO LIVES demonstrates the artist’s fixation with the way he sees his environment and the connections he forges in his head, the way an artist works (highlighted in the studio scene, watching an artist at work). His associations take us through a tangled web that links religion with voyage and discovery–the plotting of old men in Spanish bar of holy wars, lost ghosts, forgotten religions, cultural histories–in an enigmatic collection of visuals, thoughts, and sounds. Not surprisingly, ending the video with the mouth again, metamorphosed through editing trickery into eyes, maybe a mask, echoing the viewer, not without a flicker and a blink with the olives back again in the centre of vision, the pupil of the eye, glistening in the sun.
*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and The Container
