Imagining the Invisible: The Endless ‘Dots’ of Life
KEINO Yuka

The natural environment surrounding the Aomori Contempo-rary Art Centre (ACAC) is the most colorful and varied from November to December. After the peak of the fall foliage, the leaves are blown away by the cold winds, and after the first snowfall, the landscape transforms drastically. The presence of ‘life’ also changes, from the busyness of birds and animals gath-ering food (and people climbing Mt. Hakkoda) to the stillness of the long winter and deep snowfall. Where has the life gone? We know that animals will return in spring and plants will grow vigorously, but how are they sleeping under the snow?
　　During his 40-day residency at ACAC, MAEDA Kohei focused on the ever-changing ‘subnivium’, or microhabitat. In the past, snow was only seen as something that hid the food of land animals, making hibernation necessary; in spring, it then became something that sustained life by melting into water. However, the small space between the snow and the ground is surprisingly stable, and even warmer than the ground surface. Flora and fauna, including fungi and other microorganisms, are protected from the cold as they go through various processes, such as photosynthesis, germination, reproduction, and decom-position[1].
　　Taking the ‘lights of life’, or activity, which exists despite being hidden under the snow, as his starting point, Maeda did various ‘Exercises’ in which he tried to extract ‘dots’ of the ‘invisible’ lights of life, ranging from the micro to the macro scale, at ACAC’s location. In his work-in-progress exhibition, titled Lit-up Mountain, Astral Foothills, Maeda gathered the traces of various Exercises, both large and small, to examine how the energy generated by each activity would be reflected and deposited in this place. It was probably his attempt to keep refining the meaning of this activity, which was not clearly vis-ible while conducting the Exercises, by sharing the experience with others and generating many reflections.
　　Maeda, who was an accomplished canoe-sprinter during his high school days, and once participated in the world cham-pionships, uses his own physical experiences as clues and step-ping stones to approach the ambiguous zone where nature and humans meet, including the water’s edge. This perspective can also be seen in Maeda’s choice of the term ‘exercise’ (meaning work out and practice) to describe his activities. Each Exercisehad no clear purpose or expected outcome. They were some-times unsuccessful and were challenging, requiring flexibility and instant responses. In the large-scale Exercises, conducted as events, he planned to do things that were difficult to do aloneand were unable to be accomplished without collaboration.
　　In Aomori, Maeda wondered why the Sangaku-shinkofaith, or mountain worship (a kind of manifestation of ‘invis-ible’ energy, seen in many parts of the world), is not observed at Mt. Hakkoda, even though he imagined that the mountain region, where ACAC is located, and its surrounding environ-ment would, since ancient times have gone through continuous changes due to the efforts of people With the assumption that “there is a mountain god in Hakkoda,” Maeda came up with the idea to stimulate the god’s feet by having people gather at fumoto (or fumimoto: the foot of the mountain[2] ) and perform Exercises to emit heat. There is a cluster of reflex areas (where peripheral nerves are concentrated) in the soles of the feet, and these are connected to each internal organ in the body. The foot of the mountain can be considered as an important place, and where the feet of the mountain god lay. In fact, when unraveling the folklore of the area, we found legends such as Dake no Oh-hito (Giant of the Mountain)[3] , about a giant who lived in the mountains. This mythical existence, which transcends boundaries and can even be perceived by villagers, is both awe-inspiring and mysterious, but it has not taken root at Hakkoda as a faith or religion that is deeply connected to people’s daily lives.
　　Based on the idea that there’s no specific entity, Maeda made a video work, Stretching, that projected his naked body, moving like a fetus, onto the surface of the foot of Mt. Hak-koda. When the image was actually projected, the fluctuating light illuminated the shimmering of the trees. It seemed as if the indigenous bacteria on the surface of the skin were visible, or as if the ‘invisible’ parts of the body became cognizable, tak-ing in and integrating with the surrounding living organisms and wriggling as one. Indeed, We are living here, breathing the same air as these trees do, and eating the crops grown in the soil of this land.
　　As an element of Exercise, Maeda turned his attention to the land, especially the soil. In Foot Reflection Daily Selfie, a daily record of Maeda’s contact between his feet and the ground, he stepped on various surfaces around the ACAC premises, and made footprints on them, thereby communicating with the earth and exchanging energy. Perhaps microorganisms in the soil and on his soles also interacted, slightly influencing each other, or the soil may have depressed, affecting the subnivium. The footprints, while buried under the snow, may retain their shape and, one day, be unearthed like an archaeological site.
　　Exercises (1) through (4), which were carried out as events, were intended to warm the foothills by creating an “astral foothill”, or, in other words, a “foothill meeting place” for many people to gather and interact for all Exercises, and to have these interactions stimulate for the mountain, as pushing on foot pressure points. The whole project seemed to trace human civilization back, while attempting, through his Exercises, to restore the relationship with an earth excluded from modern urban life. Exercises included harvesting vegetables grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides in a farm close to ACAC (Exercise 1), digging in the soil and picking up stones from the river where stones were collected for the Jomon stone circles (Exercise 2), and firing an earthenware pot, made using clay extracted from the reservoir (Exercise 4).
　　Needless to say, fire played an important role in Maeda’s Exercises, as did soil. The series about the use of fire, such as making a fire and boiling Oden (Exercise 1), keeping water boiling (Exercise 2), and keeping the kiln burning while boiling Udon noodles (Exercise 4), involved the very human act of con-trolling fire, turning natural entities, that are like raw materials, into a socialized form through the cultural act of processing. These activities with fire seemed an intermediary to connect nature and man[4] . The use of fire in rituals and the worship of flames can be seen in many religions around the world, but Maeda must have also regarded the act of lighting torches andsimultaneously turning the light from iPhones and flashlights towards the sky to draw the foot of the mountain god (Exercise 3), as an intermediary to connect heaven and earth, while treating fire symbolically but not making it sacralized.
　　MINAKATA Kumagusu, a pioneer of natural history and folklore studies in Japan, spent most of his life in Tanabe City, Wakayama Prefecture, which, coincidentally, is Maeda’s hometown. Actually, Maeda himself has also been involved in the Mandalabo project (2016‒) and other projects to explore Minakata’s thinking. Minakata represented “Minakata Manda-la”, a diagram of a world view that interconnects science with Mahayana Buddhism. According to TSURUMI Kazuko, the important parts in this diagram are the suiten (intersections), which she describes as “a place of encounter where all people meet, a kind of intersection,” and “a place where very different things influence each other by interacting or bumping into each other there”.[5]
　　Maeda’s Exercises also used soil and fire as important media, creating a suiten that could be established only at a given moment, generating a kind of “fermentation heat” with the artist as the central catalyst. The word ‘ferment’ also means to bring to a boil or stimulate, and the root ‘fer-’ constitutes not only the term ‘fermentation’ but also ‘effervescence’ (boiling and bubbling), and ‘fervor’ [6] . The symbolically-installed Foot Chart was a collective model of the dots created in the habitat of the Lit-up Mountain, Astral Foothills project, and looked like the reflex area on the sole of the mountain god. (The other foot is thought to have been explored in Exercise 3.) The heat generated by the body was an incredibly small point from the perspective of the universe, and was invisible. However, being brought together by the mediator (artist), this heat will con-tinue to flicker and multiply endlessly. The dots are certainly connected to the “lights of life” in the soil, now buried under the snow.

[1] Advocated by Jonathan N PAULI (forest and wildlife ecologist) and Benjamin ZUCKERBERG in 2013.Jonathan N Pauli, Benjamin Zuckerberg, et al. The subnivium: a deteriorating seasonal refugium, “Frontiers in Ecology and the Environ-ment,” Volume 11, Issue 5 pp. 260‒267.
[2] The word fumimoto refers to the land or its foundation, which can be trodden on by foot, and has come to refer to the lower part of the mountain.
[3] Shinpen Aomoriken Sosho (New Edition of Aomori Prefectural Series), Volume 2, Rekishi Toshosha, 1973, pp. 4‒5.
[4] Claude LEVI-STRAUSS, Mythologique I: The Raw and the Cooked, translated by HAYAMI Yotaro, published by Misuzu Shobo, 2006. In his “The Culinary Triangle”, boiled food mediated by water is considered close to the state of being rotten.
[5] TURUMI Kazuko. Minakata Kumagusu, Suiten no Shiso (Shinpan) (Kumagusu Minakata, The Idea of Suiten New Edition), 2021, p.165
[6] “Etymology: fer (v)-” https://eigogen.com/gogen/170/ (Last viewed in February 2023.)

[Translator: KATO Kumiko (Penguin Translation)]