For fans of the popular Netflix series Stranger Things, the Upside Down is an alternate dimension existing in parallel to the human world and containing its locations and structures reinvented in a darker and colder environment and wrapped in a thick fog.
Yet The Upside Down could also be explored from an architectural or arty perspective as it happens at the Japan Pavilion at the 57th International Art Exhibition in Venice (on until Sunday).
The pavilion revolves around Takahiro Iwasaki's new installations, reunited under the title "Turned Upside Down, It's a Forest".
Born in 1975 in Hiroshima, Takahiro Iwasaki is one of Japan's leading artists. Though he obviously did not live the tragic experience of the atomic bomb, the history of Hiroshima informs his artworks: Iwasaki for example employs quite a few everyday objects in his pieces, almost referencing the ordinary artifacts housed at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, daily necessities that lost their form and function after the explosion.
The centre piece of the pavilion is entitled "Out of Disorder (Mountains and Sea)" and it consists in a pile of discarded laundry stacked on the floor. If you look closer you discover thin threads emerging from the clothes and forming intricate constructions of steel towers, railway tracks and Ferris Wheels.
The steel towers contribute to turn the pile of discarded clothes into a mountain range reminiscent of the scenic landscape along the coast of the Setouchi region in Japan. The Setouchi region is an industrial zone facing decline because of the shifts it went through from heavy to service industry and now onto information technology.
In the middle of the pile of clothes there is a hole carved in the floor of the pavilion. The building is indeed elevated from the ground and supported from beneath by piloti.
A set of stairs built in the piloti area allows visitors to climb up and emerge from beneath, gazing at the work and at the mini landscape in front of them from the perspective of the sea. The effect is uncanny yet spellbinding.
The appeal of Iwasaki's work lies indeed in the different impressions they provide depending on the perspectives at which they are observed: visitors emerging from the hole in the floor get the fish-eye perspective as they come to the surface of the floor like fish from beneath the water; while those who enter the pavilion from the main door get a bird's eye view over the landscapes created by Iwasaki.
The visitors emeging from the piloti will see the human presence represented by the mini-structures; the others will probaly focus more on the range of mountains created by the clothes.
There are more pieces evoking an upside down dimension, such as the two works entitled "Reflection Model". One is inspired by the Itsukushima Shrine built over 800 years ago upon the ocean in a bay in the Miyajima region near Hiroshima; the other represents a five-story pagoda in the grounds of Ruriko-ji, a temple located in the city of Yamaguchi, around 100 kilometres from Hiroshima.
The two structures are inspired by images of the shrines and temples reflecting upon the surface of the water. The models are made with cypress wood, but their reflection is not created by water but by another structure built underneath the original one. The main aim of these pieces is destabilising the visitor's perspective while blurring the line between reality and imagination (the piece inspired by the Itsukushima Shrine looks like a temple, but, from a distance, it also calls to mind a spaceship).
Two further pieces in the pavilion play around with the concepts of perception and deception: "Out of Disorder (Offshore Model)" consists in a table covered in a black plastic sheet on which the artist recreated a miniature oilrig surrounded by rocks. The work is therefore a reference to the oil extraction processes along Japan's coasts, but the configuration of the rocks and the oilrig references the rocks in the Japanese garden of Kyoto's Ryoan-ji temple.
"Tectonic Model (Flow)" consists instead in an antique table with books stacked in an unstable manner. By approaching the table visitors will discover that a bookmark string has been turned into a crane, so that the book actually appears as a building in construction. There are many metaphors to discover in this particular piece, from construction methods to earth's instability and earthquakes.
The title of the exhibition - "Turned Upside Down, It's a Forest" comes from a book by Tiziano Scarpa, "Venice is a Fish: A Guide". In the volume Scarpa argues that, if Venice was turned upside at its boundary with the water, it would become a forest.
Through his work Iwasaki invites us to explore the environments in which we move in imaginative ways and reinvent the perspective from which we look at the world.
The artist also incorporates playful and surprising elements in his works (check out the tiny pagoda made with threads pulled from a sock hanging outside the pavilion or the model of Santa Maria della Salute church made with threads from a dust cloth and delicately resting on a deck brush used to wax the floors of the pavilion – the brush hinting at the stakes on which Venice is built), and employs them to remind us that different perspectives exist also in our lives. In a nutshell, looking at the world from the Upside Down may provide us with some great surprises – Stranger Things' fans may know it, but now also art lovers will discover it.
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