I Love Japan
Fifteen industrial fans inflating a pret-a-potter collection, one hundred square meters of digital wallpaper displaying western cliches regarding Japan, a minimal-industrial-post-noise dj and its video counterpart jamming live in seven coordinated projectors and the equal number of speakers, three hundred hipsters eager to find his picture in AB or Neomoda's next week edition. All together in a one hundred fifty square meters room by a post-modern Barcelonan architect that never came out of the closet of critical regionalism. And still the commission seemed suspiciously clear from the very beginning; A fashion show with neither models nor catwalk to present a collection that had in Japan its alibi. How far we moved from the original intention is still a question; the conversations with the client were initially haunted by empty and floating signifiers, Empires of Signs and other semiotic anxieties. Today what seems definitely clear is that the materials we used differed from those regular of our construction sites. Not only because they require sexier technologies but because we got ride of almost anything that was not event or happening. Temporary, fast, atmospheric, incontrollable, the mechanisms invented for I love Japan included in its constitutive genome masses of cool-hunters, white-noises and epileptic flashes, the erotic aromas of glamorous fashion; i.e. high architectural intensities and shrinking space for design decisions.
In collaboration with Ema Dunner, Jorge Meneses, Ana Otero and Ana Xambo.
