BUNCH OF JAPANESE KIDS

GOING WILD WITH A BUNCH OF JAPANESE KIDS and KEEPING QUIET WITH A BUNCH OF JAPANESE KIDS IN THE DARK
 

I am of mixed Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese descent. For the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Japanese immigration in Brazil, I was asked to present a performance. I doubted, performance does not really go with paying a tribute.

After thinking about it for a few days, however, I had an idea that was worth trying out. There would be two installations. In the first, one person would go alone into a room where 20 Japanese kids were having a boisterous party, dancing and jumping around wildly. Each participant would remain in this environment for three minutes.

Then the same person would be led to another room where three Japanese kids sat silently in the dark. As in the first room, participants would go into the installation alone and stay for three minutes. I called this work “GOING WILD WITH A BUNCH OF JAPANESE KIDS” and “KEEPING QUIET WITH A BUNCH OF JAPANESE KIDS IN THE DARK”.

The idea was for visitors to go into the rooms one at the time for a candid personal aesthetic experience, an exposition to both situations proposed by the enunciations. We are part of the world. Feeling things and perceiving them is letting ourselves be taken over by them. In this case, by a bunch of Japanese kids.

SESC hosted this project in São Paulo. There was such a long line waiting to go into the rooms that we had to alternate different groups of kids.

Elisa Ohtake