About the artwork

The Great Hanshin Earthquake that devastated Kobe showed us the fragility of our daily lives by demonstrating how easily the usual can be instantly turned upside down. After the earthquake, blue sheets covered houses’ damaged roofs; as the recovery work progressed, the sheets were removed. Their disappearance was thus a direct indicator of the progress of Kobe’s restoration. For this project, Blue Sheets, we created a blue corridor of blue sheets connecting the entrance and the exhibition space in the huge warehouse where the exhibition was held. In the exhibition space, films of extraordinary scenes, the devastation by earthquake, were contrasted with films of ordinary scenes, Matsudai’s scenery. The contrast between the “extraordinary” of the earthquake and the “ordinary” of Matsudai brought both into sharper focus. The terraced fields and natural beauty that epitomize the ordinary in Matsudai are radically different from the utterly extraordinary situation of Kobe during the earthquake. This extreme contrast made Matsudai the perfect place to express the radical interruption that the earthquake brought to daily life in Kobe, for Matsudai is its antithesis.