The Vibrant Mountains and Rivers (2021) was held across three sites in the upper Omi River basin: Izu City Museum, Kamishiraiwa Archaeological Site, and Omiya Shrine. Extending the timeline from the 1958 Kanogawa Typhoon back to the Kawagodaira eruption roughly 3,200 years ago, four participating groups re-read different temporal layers of the same land: disaster, personal history, Jomon ritual, shrine landscape, and volcanic time. The typhoon destroyed Shiraiwa Onsen, and the effort to recover the hot spring led to the invitation of Nakaizu Onsen Hospital—a history that also intersected with the family history of artist Ryo Shimizu.

At Izu City Museum, Ryo Shimizu, Takuya Isomura, and Masahiko Ito created a video installation in which Shimizu’s memories of birth intersected with the natural and cultural history of the Izu Peninsula. At Kamishiraiwa, Kohei Sumi, Masaki Suzuki, and Motonaka Senga produced Loss of the Center, Absence of Prayer. At Omiya Shrine, Miwa Nakazawa presented folding-screen paintings of Naka-Izu’s natural landscape, while Dai Matsuoka performed I am Her at both Omiya Shrine and Kamishiraiwa as the fictional figure “her,” imagined as having lived in the Jomon period.

Related programs included the roundtable “Volcanoes and People,” online artist talks, Miwa Nakazawa’s workshop and work talk, and two performances by Dai Matsuoka. By opening modern disaster, personal memory, archaeology, belief, and deep volcanic time simultaneously within the same land, the project moved more decisively toward a method in which local people, researchers, craftspeople, and artists walk the land together and open its multiple temporal layers without speaking on behalf of those directly affected by disaster.

WORK / LOSS OF THE CENTER, ABSENCE OF PRAYER

At Kamishiraiwa, a circular arrangement of stones from the late Jomon period survives at a site thought to have been used for ritual. Yet it is no longer clear what people prayed to there, or what once occupied its center. The “loss of the center” does not mean that the geometric center of the stone circle has disappeared. Rather, the meaning once concentrated there—the object of prayer and the acts directed toward it—can no longer be recovered. Instead of reconstructing a lost sacred object, I wanted to make the condition of that absence itself perceptible.

Masaki Suzuki made conical earthen forms based on hands joined in prayer. They evoke the gesture of prayer without becoming idols. Motonaka Senga carved, from a single cypress, a bridge-like stage spanning the stone circle. Although it was a stage, no performer stood upon it. Visitors crossed the bridge and looked down into the empty center. With both the praying subject and the object of prayer left indeterminate, only the viewer’s body was directed toward what had once been a center. The work placed the residual image of a lost ritual beside the present-day emptiness of the archaeological park, connecting them without attempting to restore what had disappeared.