Acquisition of something, sometime, some place far from here 此処ではないどこか、違う時間に、それではないなにかをもらう

According to French Sociologist, Marcel Mauss, gifts aren’t free. In his famous essay, The Gift, he explores the obligations on us to give gifts and more importantly to reciprocate what has been given, either in equal or greater value of what was received. He argued that the practice of gift exchange and the obligation to reciprocate gifts is extremely important in order to maintain social harmony.

I thought of Mauss’s theory when I visited Ozakai cave in Toyama Prefecture, a region in Japan. This ancient cave dwelling, which was carved by the sea, has a Shinto shrine built in front of it. I imagined the people who lived in this difficult environment and whose very survival depended on what nature gave them, felt an obligation to pray to the gods to reciprocate for the gifts they received. This interdependence between nature and humans and a need to maintain a kind of harmony is similar to his theory.

In my work, ‘Acquisition of something, sometime, some place far from here’, I show the interdependence of the gift exchange with recordings of my life experiences that were materialized into physical matter. Even though my experiences themselves are not physical matter, I feel the action of materializing them onto glass and other materials creates a reciprocating action and interdependence between the two worlds. A kind of give and take, the information needs the physical world to be expressed and the physical world needs the information to create from. You cannot have one without other – much like the code of the gift.