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This is a new edition of a 2010 work. For the original work, I asked Riko Shoufukutei, professional performer of rakugo (a Japanese traditional sit-down comedy where the lone performer acts as various characters while remaining seated on a zabuton cushion), to convert a little-known old Japanese story, which had been adapted into animation in 1982, into the rakugo format. The story is about a guy named Zenbei, whose eyeballs are freed from their sockets, soaring through the air in the grasp of crows to see the view from the sky, and then luckily coming back to the sockets, yet mistakenly put inside-out, thus capturing the hidden world inside his body. In addition to this folktale, this new version involves another context ― the real, not fictional, Zenbei. Living in Osaka in the Edo Period, Zenbei Iwahashi was renowned for his handmade telescopes. Driven by my assumption that he was the model of the folktale's protagonist (because using a telescope and having your eyeballs in the sky must function in the same way), I asked Riko to re-arrange the rakugo plot, and I organized his stage at Zenbei Land, the museum of Iwahashi's telescopes and related materials in his birthplace: Kaizuka City, Osaka. This video piece, which documents the performance, was exhibited in my show at Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Aichi, curated by Kazuho Soeda, from late 2012 to early 2013. Video stills Installation views 副田一穂「意識は眼球に宿る、あるいは江戸時代の眼球譚」 |