Baku Eats Dreams and Writes Diaries
Before You Dream, a local bus design for Zentan Bus by Miho Shimizu, as part of Toyooka OmniBus, 2022
Collaboration with Ryuichiro Suzuki
The project started as a project for the artist-in-residency program at the Kinosaki International Arts Center in Japan. This art center, dedicated to performing arts, was a familiar place for me, since I have stayed there several times in the past for various projects. Every time I visited, I became more interested in exploring the area, rather than staying indoors in their studio, rehearsing. Kinosaki is a popular tourist destination and is famous for its hot springs, a place which people visit from all over the world and rest in ryokan (Japanese inns). The area is scenic with traditional architecture, and is surrounded by mountains and nature. As I stayed, the place started to feel like a stage set, maintaining a perfect appearance, a dream-like space. One day, when I was walking down the main street in the middle of the night, the whole town looked as if it was sleeping, as if it didn’t exist when people were off to bed. It was like walking through a theater without its audience and actors, in between performances, where the curtain was down with just scenography sets and props left on site. Being inspired by Kinosaki, a place for people to have a rest (dream), Before You Dream was set out to explore the idea of dreams in combination with performing arts.
However, the residency was postponed several times, affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, pushing us to change our plans. As a response, we started an online radio program ahead of the physical residency. The online radio gave us a platform to have conversations with people from all sorts of backgrounds, which as a result became a record of people's voices and dreams during this extraordinary time.
Online radio: anchor.fm/yumewomiru (Currently only episode 9 and 10 are in bilingual)
Toyooka OmniBus, a performance event in a form of tour run as a spinoff of Before You Dream.
Co-directed with Ryuichiro Suzuki. Project was organised by Zentan Bus and planned by POST.
In 2021, we finally managed to visit Kinosaki and conducted some research as an extension of the radio program. At a later date the project culminated as a bus tour organised on a bus I designed using photographs and drawings we have done during the residency period and inspired from the site we visited. The tour set the bus as a live recording studio, where the audience was treated as listeners of the radio program. It involved readings of dreams we collected and a brief stop to a bookshop that gave a hint to the guest who appeared later in the tour. Half way into the tour, we picked up a Rakugo performer, a self-claimed number one fan of the radio program. Rakugo is a traditional story telling format in Japan and he performed a story that incorporated dream related myths from the area as well as various incidents that happened during the tour, making reality and fiction blur like a dream.
The bus, which was designed for this project still runs as a local bus today.
On other occasion, I organised an online dream reading event as part of MAP 2021, an online residency by Heritage Space in Vietnam. Here, dreams seen during the pandemic and collected in Vietnam were read in both Vietnamese and English, using zoom. I was interested in the form of story telling, how words could describe sometimes indescribable, and how we do this.