Aki Kuroda - A discussion with Tatsuo Miyajima

A discussion between Aki Kuroda and Tatsuo Miyajima

Directed by Mori Yuichi

Mori Yuichi: To begin, I would like Tatsuko to give us her opinion on Aki's work during the 1980s.

Miyajima Tatsuo: During that time, I was a contemporary otaku artist, watching and listening to a lot of different things. I was still quite young, but I was aware of everything that was happening on the Japanese art and scene, and in my opinion all the people who stood out were in some way similar. They had all been influenced by the trends and movements of that time - which was perfectly understandable, and of course it would have been strange if there hadn't been a similarity between them. But I felt something different about Aki; He looked out of place. [laughing] It was really weird because his work didn't reflect the Japanese influence of the time. There was no telling where his style came from.

Aki Kuroda: I'm still not in my place" [laughing]

Miyajima: The first time I realized he was different was after I went to the Venice Biennale in 1989. Then in 1993, Aki was the youngest artist to have a solo exhibition, at the National Museum of Modern Art, in Tokyo, which pushed me to keep up to date with what Aki was going to do next. Even though I had studied in Japan and managed to be in Venice, the Japanese art world saw me as a reverse import, suddenly making me a big triumph when I returned after the breakthrough in Venice. And suddenly I felt out of place, and it made me think of Aki.

A long time ago, Fram Kitagawa and Kumi Sugai had a debate with the theme "Far from the 100 Million", a number that directly refers to Japan. In other words, the discussion addressed Sugai's position which was outside the mainstream. That's exactly what I thought about Aki: he belongs to another movement.

Kuroda: Six years ago when I first met Yoshitomo Nara, he told me that he had seen my work in Tokyo, at the time he was a student, and that made him want to to go abroad. When I think about people like Tatsuo and Nara coming to see my work, it makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Mori: Imagine that you are talking about "Metaphor and/or Symbolism" at an exhibition held by Kunio Motoe in 1984.

Miyajima: It was really a great exhibition. I still have strong memories of it.

Kuroda: There have been some criticisms, but I found it to be an extremely interesting exhibition.

Miyajima: A year before that, in 1983, he had the exhibition: "Contemporary Art of the UK", which was also fantastic. Followed by "Human and materials" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in 1970, there were not so many such beautiful exhibitions in Japan. Then in the 1980s there was a new lease of life in exhibitions like Contemporary Art of the UK and Metaphor and/or Symbolism. Symbolism"), and for students, like me at the time, it was refreshing.

Mori: Tatsuo, after that, did you start making your "gadgets" and "digital counters"?

Miyajima: It was a little later, in 1988.

Kuroda: The first time I saw Tatsuo's work was at the Venice Biennale in 1999. At that time, partly because of my laziness, I didn't go to museums or exhibitions. But the moment I got home, I started shaking, even though I hadn't heard of him. I immediately realized that there was something special about his work. So special that I could no longer produce for my own work.

Miyajima: It's very kind of you to say that, but at the time when Aki came to the forefront, I immediately thought that the shapes, the colors he designed, as well as his way of using space, were like no other artist around.

Kuroda: I always feel like I'm out of the flow. In a way it's still difficult, but when you're my age, you want to do what you want. Sometimes we decide to do something completely different.

Mori: Do you think this behavior comes from your own history?

Kuroda: My father was an economics professor, but originally he was a painter. For my part, I have painted since I was very little. When I was 15 or 16, American Art was becoming more and more popular, so I painted all over the house, which really annoyed my parents. I didn't go to art school or anything close to it, I was just having fun with painting. I loved painting, but everyone told me it was over.

Around the same time, I met a man named James Lee Byars, who organized happenings, including one in the middle of the night at Sokoku-ji Temple in Kyoto, he also did a lot of events in museums and many other places. I was just a kid, so he would show me around and be there for me. He was also someone who stood out in Kyoto. For my part, both I played with painting, and at the same time I was also interested in Contemporary Art.

Today they are all gone, but when I lived in Teramachi-Dori, there were a lot of places that made tombstones, so I often found stone remains and arrowheads. I collected them and buried them following the streets I took to get to an exhibition, I created my own map. I was doing it alone, and then I stopped painting.

When I was in college, the student movement was thriving in the Department of Aesthetics in Doshisha, the question on everyone's lips was, "Is aesthetics dead?" But I organized Happenings in public places like the Student Union, to provoke people. For example, a group of students made a plastic object 2 meters high, which we made in the street because no one had a studio. Then we would put someone inside and move it, and finally the person would put their arms and legs through the object. Everyone watching was involved in the student's demonstration, they came to us with pieces of wood in their hands. At the end, they came on stage, and we came down and applauded them. Lots of things like this were happening at Kyoto University and elsewhere.

After that, I moved away from school to spend a year between Paris and New York, at which time Tadao Ando was around. After my diploma, I couldn't find a job. There were certainly jobs but I was slowing down and I was carefree [laughing], then I moved to Paris in 1970. Before the end of the first decade, Art was at a standstill. So I worked part time. During this period, I met Tetsumi Kudo, Shusaku Arakawa and Jun Ebara on several occasions, then we often saw each other around meals. I also sometimes cooked for myself, but when I found "the art world", I got very involved with these people, we killed time together. I made 5 different coffees a day and only spent ¥600 and stayed for an hour breaking everything. Today that seems unthinkable to me.

Some time later, I started seeing the same woman and her baby every day at the cafe. One day she asked me if I wanted to go party. Later I learned that she was a reporter for Radio France and I accepted her invitation. I went to the party, it was at a Yugoslav artist's house. I met all kinds of people, they all asked me what I was doing. I told them that I was a painter, even if it wasn't entirely true, and I don't know how that led to me being invited to participate in the Young Artists' Biennale.

Miyajima: Wow, that's amazing.

Kuroda: Someone else had spoken with the director of the Gallery, at which I am now represented, at the time this marked the beginning of great trials in my life. [laughing] Before that, I was thinking about giving up everything and returning to Japan. Kimio Jinno, whom I knew at the University, and who now runs the HAM Gallery in Nagoya, also lived in Paris, but he was someone who very rarely got out of bed, for about a year he came at home for dinner. We were talking about all the different types of Art, but when I got back to Japan, I called him and I said: "I think I'm going back, but first I want to paint. Is that Do you have any leads?"

He was interested, so I sat down and started working on 5 paintings, which now seem very small, they were squares between 1.5 and 2 meters. It happened at the same time as the meeting with the woman in the café, it was the beginning of everything. I guess you could say I started in an unusual way.

Miyajima: Looks like you were lucky.

Kuroda: No, no, it's the opposite. Something good happens but also something bad, so that everything balances out.

Miyaijma: Yuichi showed me a lot of material related to your career and a few photos of the paintings you created when you were little caught my attention. I was surprised at their quality. When you are 10 years old you are already accomplished, almost like Rouault. Then in high school you changed to Picasso using his way of dealing with Cubism.

Kuroda: It was the influence of a book I read at the time. My father had been in France before the war. He returned to Japan in 1936, it was during that same year, more precisely on February 26 that there was the incident [an attempted coup d'état], it was there that he brought back the surrealist magazine called Minotaure. That's why I sometimes call myself "Minotaur". I suppose I was influenced by "modernism" by this magazine, you can even see it in my work from when I was a child. In terms of reference I have no interest in modernism. I'm not the type of Artist who uses references. After that, I experienced difficult trials.

Mori: Speaking of references, Marguerite Duras was the first person to write about your work, did you also meet her at the café?

Kuroda: Actually, yes. I've met most people like this. The philosopher Michel Foucault lived literally ten meters from my house, we saw each other often because we went to the same pastry shop every day. This sort of thing happened time and time again. In my entire life, I have very rarely picked up my phone and asked people to meet him. I'm very shy, so organizing meetings doesn't work very well with me.

Miyajima: It's amazing that you managed to imagine and create so much from a magazine. Your story reminds me of that of Kishida Ryusei, a truly unique Japanese artist. There is an air of German Realism in his work, some people have suggested that it probably came from the photographs he looked at. But at that time there wasn't much reference. The amount of information was really limited - maybe one or two photographs. He imagined things in his own way and made incredible paintings.

kuroda: We were, of course, born after the war.
But it was a time when the only Western things in Kyoto were the chocolates that the American military handed out to people and at the opera.
And even if we could have read magazines, we wouldn't have understood anything.
I mean, we were just kids. So, for example, even if
had Dali's photos of these ecstatic faces been published, we would not have known what to do with them. [laughs]. But I still used to sneak a glance at these magazines. Then when I went out, I saw Mt. Hiei and the Kamo River which was nearby, and there were a lot of old guys walking around with tattoos of the Dragon King Kulika. And in elementary school, one of my classmates was the son of a priest at Higashi Hongan-ji temple – something only found in Kyoto. I was part of a very unique environment and yet I also had my own inner world. And as Tatsuo said, at that time there was almost no reference material.

Miyajima: When you think about how such a small amount of resources and information inspired such a huge amount of imagination, it's truly phenomenal. And although the amount of information increased much later, things had not yet reached this point in our time. There was [the magazine] Bijutsu techo, but it was the only game in town in the art world. So when someone like Aki suddenly appeared, we couldn't follow. [laughing] I mean, there was a completely different world that hadn't appeared in Bijutsu techo. That’s how limited things were back then.

Of course, there were many things that were introduced, including photographs, but the thing that amazed me the most was when I first saw Jonathan Borofsky's work. He was exhibiting on a wall at the Venice Biennale, but I couldn't
know if the works on display were photos or drawings because they seemed to float in the air. I tried to imitate that and came up with something I thought was
similar. Walter De Maria's work was another thing I had difficulty understanding. The wall in his work was painted with primary colors, but was it a painting, a sculpture or an installation? I tried to understand it in my own way and imagine what it could really be. It seems to me that people who have the ability to develop their imagination based on the most minimal information are those who
do the most interesting work. When I saw reproductions of Mark Rothko's paintings, they appeared to have been created with an impasto technique. I decided I wanted to do something like that too, so I used thick layers of paint, but when I finally got the chance to see the real thing, I realized the works had been painted with a much lighter touch. I was really surprised, but this sort of thing wasn't at all uncommon.

Mori: It was under these circumstances, Aki, that you started staged exhibitions in the 1980s, wasn't it?

Kuroda: At the time, that decade seemed really difficult, but looking back, in retrospect, it seems pretty easy. I say this because in early 1990 I suddenly collapsed. I was preparing the opening of an exhibition. an exhibition, and just before it started, I dozed off for about five minutes. Then when I came to and tried to get up, everything started spinning. I was like, “Oh no, I guess I’m going to be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.”

Mori: What do you think caused this?

Kuroda: Well, my father had just died, but I was also doing sets for a dance show at the Center Pompidou, and I was involved in a lot of other things at the same time.
I was supposed to be an irresponsible person
without any stress, but... I stayed in bed for a while and one day the philosopher Michel Serres, whom I had always wanted to meet, came to see me, and since then I have moved further and further away from art. I moved away from the world of selling individual works and approached the space in collaborations with dancers and architects.
But of course I always find two-dimensional work interesting.

Mori: Aki, you've often said that since you were a child your brush "moves and paints of its own accord." What exactly do you mean by that?

Miyajima: From an artist's point of view, you can't even
we don't even think about it. It's like a literary style - although perhaps not the best analogy - you just decide on a certain type of writing. Even if the medium or context varies, after being involved in creating things for many years, a certain type of writing naturally takes shape, right?

Kuroda: Sorry to suddenly deviate in another direction, but what I'm involved in now is "space". I create spaces as part of a workshop for university students. Once we finish an installation, we invite a dancer and other guests to join us for a tea party. invited to join us for a snack. I try to create a sort of “garden” where everyone can come and go as they please. When I break down into parts, my body moves of its own will. By breaking it down into parts, I think it's possible to get a slightly better view of the overall space. And maybe that's what Tatsuo means by "writing style", but it's something that took me 15 years to realize, after visiting abandoned quarries and factories.

Mori: You're referring to the Cosmo Garden here, right?

Kuroda: Yes. I realize this name might sound a little easy, but I'm basically inviting interested people to join me and do whatever they want. I simply establish the basic framework of a project to ensure that everything doesn't turn into a big mess. I've done this several times now, having, as I said, established some ground rules.

Miyajima: Do these events take place outside or inside? Or
both ?

Kuroda: In principle, anything is possible.

Mori: You also have your own paintings and art objects
there, isn't it?

Kuroda: There are books that I read as a child and others that I am currently reading. which I'm currently reading, and there's a cafe in the back. It's quite messy. [laughs]

Mori: And spectators can just walk in, right? In this direction,
It seems to have something in common with the concepts behind Tatsuo's Kaki Tree project and Art in You. Part This partly has to do with the destruction of the roles of "artist", "artwork" and "spectator". and "spectator", but I find the way Aki tries to involve the spectator very interesting.

Miyajima: Yes, for about ten years I have also used this kind of approach. this kind of approach as well. I think what we call "art" should pull things from the viewer rather than forcing them into a single work that says, "I am something different. Look at me!" After all, it's not like artists are all-powerful gods or anything. It seems to me that the relationship should be a very relaxed one in which we simply help the viewer discover their own interests. I call this project “Art in You”. Art is not something that artists have the patent for; it is something that exists inside ordinary people.

Kuroda: What does the word "you" mean in this title?

Miyajima: First of all, I'm referring to the viewer, but ultimately to anyone other than myself. It seems to me that there is an artistic channel in each of us, and once it opens, people become more sensitive and begin to be touched by art. Otherwise, no matter how fantastic the art is, it won't be understood by most people. When people are able to think of art as "wonderful", it is because they have a receiver that allows them to pick up the signal that the artist is transmitting. If there were no receivers, and artists just sent things, nothing would ever happen. Over the past ten years since I started using the phrase "the art in you", I have found people's reactions to be very interesting. I am a person who is
involved in the creation of the art, but the reactions I got from spectators, the general public and other participants were simply wonderful.

Mori: Do these projects also use "digital counters" and "gadgets" like your other projects? and “gadgets” as in your other works?

Miyajima: Yes, and there are also the “death clock” works that allow the viewer to participate. which allow the spectator to participate. I've also been doing some photography lately and I find the things in these works to be really interesting.

Kuroda: By the way, although I was by no means a juvenile delinquent.
juvenile delinquent, when I was growing up in Kyoto, I was quite rebellious. I had three friends and we all encouraged this aesthetic of “mengiri” (“fixed gaze”).

Miyajima: Mengiri?

Kuroda: You don't remember that word? Everyone used to use it.

Miyajima: Oh, are you talking about what they call "menchigiri" in Kansai [a region in western Japan]? [laughs]

Kuroda: That's it. When a guy looks tough
presented himself, you did everything to look him straight in the eyes. in the eyes. Of course this would start a fight and, although I always got beaten up, it led to some sort of communication. On Of course, I always got beaten soundly, but... [laughs]

Miyajima: Wow, were you really that bad?

Kuroda: Well, more than bad, I was just a little weird. If I
walked around looking like I do now, I would never be accepted by any of these gangs. At the time, I had this idea that these activities were some sort of "aesthetic statement", but thinking about it now, it all seems pretty stupid.

Miyajima: Your lifestyle is reminiscent of the characters in the movie Pacchigi. It is set in Kyoto and Sawajiri Erika plays a student at a high school for Japanese-born Korean girls. The film depicts various groups of people and focuses on a romance between her character and her Japanese boyfriend, who is also in high school. And remember there's this kid who hangs around all the time who's supposed to be the son of a Buddhist priest, played by Joe Odagiri? You look exactly like him.

Kuroda: Really? You mean he's also a little off base? [laughs]

Miyajima: He's always hanging around and doing nothing. In the last scene we see him painting without caring about anything and I'm sure he was supposed to be a student at Doshisha. [He is seen playing the tune of "Kanashikute yarikirenai" [Unbearably Sad] by the Folk Crusaders, a popular song at the time, on the guitar, and then he suddenly leaves for Europe. Then, upon his return, he suddenly began to make abstract paintings.

Mori: So this experience had a strong influence on the
character.

Miyajama: It was really important. Aki really reminds me of Odagiri Joe's character. The film also shows the conflicts between the Korean students and the Japanese students, and there are many fight scenes where they stare at each other and accuse each other of staring at each other. [laughs]

Kuroda: There were definitely a lot of fights going on at that time.
the time. Even at a relatively casual school like Doshisha, you could get beat up by a bunch of jocks just for wearing blue jeans. But today, they're the kind of people who would probably wear pink shirts, which would have been unthinkable at the time. There was constant fighting between Japanese and Koreans, people from the north and south of the city, and yakuza gangs. There were parts of Kyoto that were supposed to be okay to visit and parts that weren't, but I had no desire to venture into these supposedly dangerous places alone. It's the kind of thing I loved doing, but I always came back black and blue. [laughs]

Miyajima: [laughs] Sorry, I think we got a little off track
there.

Kuroda: Maybe, but this kind of thing seems more realistic to me.

Mori: Well, to come back to a more difficult subject [laughs],
Aki, although not all of the things you do seem to be related in some way, I think they are actually all connected in some way. For example, at the beginning, in the 80s, you created a work called conti/NUIT/e1. If we translated this word into English, it would mean something like "continuity", but there are also two slashes and the French word nuit in the title. In Motoe Kunio's essay on your work, he speaks of continuity, but also of the appearance of clusters of discontinuity.

Kuroda: Night is definitely in there, but you can also think
to the French expression on nuit, which refers to a straight line that continues to infinity. Except there are times here where things get tangled and spaces where we get tangled up with other people. To me, that means an artistic space. When you finally manage to untangle yourself, your line becomes tangled with another line in the same way that a man and a woman can get tangled. It's a tough world sometimes, because one member of the tangle may decide to cut the line, even if the other falls. But we get tangled again and make a new connection. I see it as a circuit that stretches in a straight line without end, so even though two entanglements can happen on the same night, they seem very different to me.

Miyajima: That's an interesting idea. Is it also
for relationships?

Kuroda: Yes, I think so.

Miyajima: I see. Well, I started producing gadgets and LED digital displays to express three specific concepts. The first was the “connection between all things.” I arrived at this concept after considering the things that were most important to me and eliminating each of them one by one. When I tried to translate the Japanese word for "relationship", I chose without hesitation the phrase "It fucks everything", because things are related in the same way that people fuck. In other words, when you build a relationship and something meaningful emerges from that connection, it's not just a handshake, but a relationship that's about something much deeper. And I feel like the kind of entangled relationships that Aki just talked about are very important to me personally, as well as to art in general. I have a great affinity with this kind of theme.

Kuroda: You have a very concise way of expressing this idea. As I said before, the world you create really thrills me. But I guess the “relationships” I’m talking about are a little closer to jelly. [laughs]
Miyajima: It may seem concise when I talk about
relationships, but I'm sure the content is also like jelly.

Mori: But the two of you really have a lot of similarities in
in your work.

Kuroda: I really like gemstones - so much so that when someone gave me a diamond or a ruby when I was a child, I would imagine how nice it would be to come in that pink color. But the diamonds were so hard that your teeth would crack if you tried to bite them, and I didn't like that feeling. With jelly, on the other hand, it just slides inside. I like the way it shakes when you cut it into thin slices. It would be so fun if when we painted a picture it could look like finely cut jelly. I know it's a naive idea on my part, but...

Mori: So what happens when jelly-like things become

tangled? Does this affect the style or form?

Kuroda: In my mind, everything stands out as a sculpture that you made by hand from mud. You know that work that everyone calls Gyoza at Meets Port JCB Hall? Actually, her name is Taro and Hanako and there are two parts. and there are two parts. The big flower is called Cosmo Flower, but it wasn't really part of the original plan. When I went to a meeting with the architects, I brought paper mache. and creating a little gyoza-sized thing with my hands. my hands, I said, "It would be nice if we had something like that here, wouldn't it?", without having thought about the design. design. The owner said he thought it was interesting too, so I left it at that. And then several months later, when I
And then, a few months later, when I returned to Japan from Paris, it had grown to the enormous size you see now. [This had absolutely nothing to do with the composition; it's literally the same shape I originally created. Finally, at the very last stage, when the plasterers were working on it, I made some very small changes, but in a sense, it's not even a sculpture.

Miyajima: That's interesting. I guess you could say the idea came out of your head and took concrete form.

Kuroda: Originally, the big flower was supposed to go
inside the building, but there was a small river that had been flowing under the area for years and years, and because of weight restrictions, this turned out not to be possible. weight restrictions, this proved to be impossible to ultimately impossible.

Miyajima: The form of this work is really strange. I don't mean that in a bad way, of course.

Kuroda: The interior is somehow similar to Tatsuo's world, and personally, I see the exterior as a parallel cosmic space or ocean. a journey through space that doesn't remind you of the current universe. the current universe.

Mori: Disorder and chaos?

Miyajima: It's the same with the ground, isn't it?

Kuroda: I was originally asked to make meter square tiles, but there were a lot of other things I wanted to try too, so it's amazing that I was able to make them as much.

Miyajima: The project was truly a massive undertaking.

Kuroda: Yes, speaking with the architects, I discovered that
that they were also quite surprised by the scale of the project.
When I returned from Paris, I discovered columns that
that I had never imagined [laughs]; it was a total collaboration between all participants. I would now like to develop this idea this idea and try it in a spa town.

Miyajima: the city of hot springs? It looks good, but why there?

Kuroda: Don't you think it would be interesting to have hot water bubbling and swarms of naked men and women everywhere? This would surely lead to all sorts of different messes. [laughs]

Mori: Is there some sort of connection between what you call
“entanglements” and the ball of breadcrumbs in the story of the Minotaur?

Kuroda: Landscape architects always use straight lines in their designs. I like the clarity of this kind of world. When a landscape architect designs a garden, he makes a path next to it. a path next to it, but there's no tangle, it's just it's just something that leads from here to there. It seems so calculated that I think it would be nice to have a piece of art there too. Because it would lead to entanglements between a few people like me, and although it might not be easy for others to understand, it might attract some of the people inside. For me, the art is in getting tangled up – whether it’s obvious or not.
In broader economic terms, when they undertake urban development projects in Europe, they always put an art object or statue in the center of the city. The sculptures are rather conservative and do not have much commercial value. commercial value, and no one really looks at them anyway, but I think they're an important presence in the sense that so many commercial institutions are involved in the economy.
But I think they're important because most things today
revolve around monetary value. In the 1970s, the dollar
became inconvertible into gold, and from that moment on, the dollar suddenly rose in numerical terms, and people forgot about primary resources. While this is certainly a model for the future, at this point the real resources disappear. Describing someone as an "artist" is a very grandiose term, and being from the era I'm in, I've always hated that word because it sounds so pretentious. But in contemporary society, it is vital to preserve these kinds of things. It was with this in mind that I started creating shows like Cosmo Garden..... But I may have strayed a little from the subject. [laughs]

Miyajima: No, what you say is very interesting. This This helps explain the "primitive" form of your works. I started studying art at the end of the conceptual period, the late 70s to the early 80s, just before figurative art came back into the spotlight. At the time, letters typed on a typewriter were considered cool - they are the equivalent of computer-printed letters today. Artists like Ueda Kaoru made super realistic works with typewritten letters. They looked really cool and everyone started imitating this style of letters. Even in paintings, the style of the artist's signature was rendered with this kind of lettering - that's the kind of era it was. But now machines have developed so much that anyone can print letters with a computer, so it is artists like Cy Twombly with his primitive style of calligraphy who are praised. Or people whose signature exudes an excessively human touch. As in the case of signatures, I have the feeling that this kind of "primitivism" will always continue to exist as the ultimate proof of originality, regardless of how contemporary society becomes and how modernism develops. Some time ago you said that my way of expressing an idea was very concise, and in fact, until about 1995, I went through a phase where I used extremely precise and random numerical formulas. But eventually, I had enough of it all. [It's pretty amazing, but if you keep doing this kind of thing, eventually you really get tired of the whole process. My expressions may still seem concise, but when it comes to the way I create things, I've become much more primitive. And in a way, it seems much more original to me.

Kuroda: The same could be said about records. No matter how many times you listen to them, old vinyls sound much more powerful than CDs.

Miyajima: I think so too. There was a time when things
more mechanical seemed cool, but that was part of the
modernism and globalism. Once you standardize everything like that, it loses all meaning.

Kuroda: The fact that there are buildings like Prada in
Omotesando is good, but the contemporary architecture seems just right
seems so tightly condensed, and there are several places like that too. It exhausts me. To make them look more like a good work of art that exudes a sculptural aura (although not necessarily to the same degree as Giacometti's work) requires a little more space between the building and adjacent structures. But focusing on three buildings that don't even have that space isn't very interesting at all.

Miyajima: At the time these towers started being built in Shinjuku, there were still kinetic sculptures in the area, made by Iida Yoshikuni and Ito Takamichi. When you went there, those were the things that really seemed to stand out. I was still quite young, but I remember all kinds of different spaces in the city that I never got tired of looking at. But one by one, all these places and spaces were destroyed. There used to be spaces where only one sculpture was kept. But today, buildings are going up everywhere, and when it comes to deciding what is necessary and what is not, sculptures and artistic objects are synonymous with useless. They are eliminated one after the other and only empty spaces remain. Now these areas seem really boring.