Daily Dose 1313

Naoya Hatakeyama

Daily Dose From now to your death 1313 | Naoya Hatakeyama "Sometime in the nineteen-eighties, riding the monorail into Tokyo, Naoya Hatakeyama had an epiphany about limestone—namely, that it was everywhere, except in the vast holes where it used to be. Blast after blast, truckload by truckload, humanity had embarked on an elaborate limestone-relocation project, otherwise known as “construction.” What once belonged to the landscape had been prized out and spun into cities. In a violent reverie, Hatakeyama imagined pulverizing every building and highway in Japan. If he could return every last spoonful of dust to the quarry from whence it came, he could restore the land, and, along with it, a vision of the past. “The quarries and the cities,” he later wrote, “are like negative and positive images of a single photograph. Hatakeyama’s career could be described as a decades-long quest for that photograph. He takes pictures of the quarries and the cities, and of the forgotten, forbidding places that bind them: factories, roads, rivers, tunnels. His work suggests that we’ve never fully countenanced the upheaval caused by industry. We see that the landscape is contused and pockmarked; we see that the skyline shimmers; but we’ve lost sight of how the former yields the latter. “Excavating the Future City,” a photo book accompanying a retrospective at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, imposes geological time on our human scale. Detached and unsentimental, it trains the eye to see prehistorically. Looking at a clutch of high-rises, you’ll think of the ore that the buildings are made from, rather than of the condos within." Dan Piepenbring Via The New Yorker. Thanks to Santiago Restrepo .