To set out for a morning walk along the
beach of Anse Volbert on Praslin Island
(Seychelles) means becoming rapidly mesmerised
by thousands of small white fossils
scattered over the shoreline. You forget the
postcard-evoking ocean, sky and horizon, turn
your eyes downwards and absorb the incessant
performance. Continuously shifted by gentle
waves, pebbles and shells with the strangest
and most sensual shapes
appear and disappear. But above
all there are pieces of coral,
smoothed by time or still sharp,
little branches or entire crowns,
but all inevitably white (except
for a very rare and pale trace
of pink), forming a sort of long
installation on a reduced scale in
a hypothetical, immense sculpture
garden between earth and
water. The whiteness of these
micro-sculptures, however, is
not a festive sign, but one of
mourning, precisely like in the
Japanese custom.
The travelling chronicler, temporarily offduty,
will soon be dismayed to notice that this is
no artistic composition. Instead it is a cemetery,
thrown onto the seashore in eternal memory of
the destruction caused to the coral reef by the
Tsunami, or by the rising temperature of the
waters that has killed 90 per cent of the coral
in the Seychelles. Each of these forms would
be the envy of Hans Arp (or Henry Moore, in the
most elaborately ornate cases), yet each is just
another small monument to the transience of
living beings, to the constant menace of death
under which they, all of us, are born and develop.
All this comes to mind as the chronicler thinks
back to the stress of work waiting thousands
and thousands of miles away from this island,
and the urgency and curiosity in describing a
project like Tokujin Yoshioka’s new invention,
for example. The young Japanese designer has
discovered a “second nature” in a mysterious
crystallisation process that literally allows
him to grow the shapes of some archetypical
pieces of furniture in water, just like coral or
madrepores. Chaise longue, armchair and even
Venus de Milo, ironically deconstructed in thousands
of small crystals agglomerated in a way
that unmistakably resembles the all-time art
legend, an involuntary icon of the same ornate
beauty that nature loves so much.
The secret
of this “design on the rocks”, which is to be
the centrepiece of an exhibition in Tokyo (at
21_21 Design Sight, 17 October
– 18 January, 2009), lies less in
its technical process, chemical
composition or gourmet recipe
(as surprising as it might be) as in
Tokujin’s extraordinarily inventive
methodology. Almost every
time he tackles a new assignment
or simply has the opportunity
to do research, he tries
to “engineer” a different way of
creating objects that varies in its
degree of wondrousness according
to its result being intended
as an industrial product or a
prototype, as in this case. He is
practically always inspired by nature, whose
generative processes he mysteriously succeeds
in reproducing (but not necessarily the formal
outcome) in an artificial, impossible challenge
to the mortal destiny that is part of nature itself.
Tokujin once again seems to go by the words
written in his first book, of which I find a signed
copy dating back to 11 April, six years ago: “Even
when everybody thinks a project is impossible,
a way will open up as long as you challenge old
ways with interest and with courage.”
Mother of invention: second nature by Tokujin
For an exhibition in Tokyo, Tokujin Yoshioka invents a bit of artificial nature with an alchemistic design formula. Design Tokujin Yoshioka. Text Stefano Casciani. Photos Nacasa & Partners Inc., Tokujin Yoshioka Design.
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- 02 October 2008
- Praslin