Shashin-an,
2022-in progress.Tea, camera obscura and garden hut.
Shizuoka prefecture, Japan
We set up a collaborative construction project of a tea hut in Shizuoka prefecture, Yagisawa.
`It is built on a permaculture (shizen noho) garden, currently in fallow phase. Located in front of Mount Fuji, and pacific ocean, it will serve as an observation apparatus of the milieu, understood in its visual but also social sense, as a revelation.
The landscape is observable through a round window (marumado), which frames the landscape in front of the hut, namely Mount Fuji; and which, once hidden by a cover, transforms the hut into a camera obscura display. The camera obscura is the ancestor of the photographic camera, and the direct relative of the pinhole camera. Dark room composed of a small hole or a lens, the device is a tool of observation but also of representation.
The connection between camera obscura and tea ceremony highlights the particular relationship between interior and exterior that the two settings deploy, namely a kind of condensation of the exterior surroundings, which is then symbolized, evoked, turned around and re-presented inside.
The Japanese archetypal landscape composed by Mount Fuji will thus be found, reversed, inside, on the scale of the whole building. As a way to look differently at the environment.
