Aki Kuroda - Sponges

In space, black holes absorb light, they are compact. Celestial objects that prevent any form of matter or radiation from escaping.

aki kuroda white sponge Aki Kuroda, White Sponge, Performance Show - Alsatian school in Paris - 2006


For Aki Kuroda, the sponge is also the representation of a world with undefined shapes and contours. A mass that absorbs while being a passage to another galaxy.

aki kuroda sponge

Aki Kuroda - Sponge

Aki Kuroda's painting becomes an interstellar journey. From Earth, all that remains is the pieces of an uncomposed past which spin through space and seed the webs, the stars. The genesis of the work is no longer confused with that of the Earth but with that of the universe as a dream, labyrinth, sponge, islands and garden. This revolution is analogous to the one that removed the Earth from the center of our cosmos. This time, there is no more Earth and the mythology that takes place has the appearance of a prophecy that no one has yet dared to pronounce.

Have we asked ourselves the question of who man will be the day we leave Earth? It is not just a question of leaving it in the sense of leaving the body and dying. It’s about (dis-)continuing the race and going to live “elsewhere”. And the figure is the possible body of this elsewhere which no longer has coordinates. The displaced, spaced out figures no longer know how to inhabit anything. They are themselves the place where everything passes and changes and passes away from bodies, places, tropes and meaning. The referents of all the stories that we will have told ourselves here below, the Earth and the heavy and “grave” body (or the grave body as a tomb body) seem to be abolished. This barely imaginable future transforms the past as time spent on Earth into a myth just as incredible as the future: time creates mixtures.

Camille Fallen


Black Sponge, original engraving

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