TEXT
Written about SACHI MIYACHI
by
Alex de Vries
We forget more than we remember. Where does it all go, the things we forget?
This is a question Sachi Miyachi asks herself. In various respects her work
is a construction for forgotten memories. In her work, she acts like an anthropologist,
making a clear distinction between the rural and the urban way of associating
with the immediate surroundings. Historically, in the countryside building is
mainly done with the materials right at hand, resulting in a cultural identity
directly connected with the landscape. In urban environments the building materials
are usually brought in from elsewhere, resulting in a different relationship
between man and his surroundings.
As her starting-point for the installations she creates, Sachi Miyachi takes
whatever she encounters in her immediate surroundings and, like an archaeologist,
she searches for useful data. As to materials, she can take whatever lies at
hand, but as regards the historical ideas connected with them, she has to make
mental sieves with which to strain the memories of times out of mind from mental
space. These lost memories are shapeless, yet she makes containers to hold them.
She made an installation in which she dissected a simple concrete cube in the
process of construction and demolition, like a repeating cycle. Walking past
this installation is like making a film. Miyachi gives shape to lost time in
tangible constructions. Her work consists of passageways. She shifts space in
time, also incorporating what happened there into the design. There is no cleaner
place than Switzerland. Upon arrival at the airport your heart clenches at the
thought you might spill your coffee, turning you into the perpetrator of a terrorist
attack right away. Hence, she designed the ultimate cleaning trolley for the
Swiss landscape. She rinses time, straining the gold from it. She gives shape
to this in a ritual sense: she washes the viewer's hair and treats it with a
special conditioner. You carry her work with you. You are one of the chosen.