Ayane Tominaga
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'We live in the bubble', collage (2019)
The collage 'We live in the bubble' depicts two different kinds of spaces; culture and nature.
Throughout the project, I had a chance to visit the woodlands in the South London residential area frequently, and I started thinking that the quality entailed in the natural environment is different completely from the environment I spend my daily life.
After researching history of the area, I found out that there was used to be an ancient oak woodland called 'The Great North Wood' in the current South London. Today the remains still have survived as fragments all over the area, such as Dulwich Wood, Sydenham Hill, etc.
According to 'Rights of Common' by Betty O'Connor, one of the fragments, One Tree Hill had once threatened by a golf-club company for the enclosure in the late 19th century. Historically, the remains of woodland had been used for making a living of the poor people for a long time. In a case of the hill, it was also used as a place for meeting or gathering for the residents, therefore the furious protest had attempted for numerous time by residents who claimed for their right of use on the land. The enclosure was lucky enough to be canceled, after all, thanks to the local government who finally took action against it by purchasing the land so that it can open for the public again.
Despite the success story of One Tree Hill, Many of the wild public space was enclosed between 1750 and 1860 due to the governmental law called 'The Enclosure Acts'. The people who lived with the land had been taken their land away by aristocracy land-grab and had had to shift themselves to live in functional units so that they make a living to create capital.
Stephen Grasso argues in his essay 'Smoke and Mirrors (part seven)' that 'It worked to reframe our culture's relationship with the land itself'.
Today we are still living in a society based on a profit function. While the forest offers various forms of life to exist together, in our society, every scrap of land has become a space of property so that it functions in a mean of the only profit-making. As Grasso argues, the cultural connection with the land is getting weak in such conditions. Even the environmental problems have to get the serious problems, the people never realised how the non-human beings are distressed by our activities because Human being lives in a different bubble of the world nonetheless we are all living together in the one single space; Earth.
コラージュwe live in the bubbleには二つの異質な空間が描かれている。
プロジェクトは、その当時移り住んだ南ロンドンを発端として始まる。特異な地理形態と点在するようにある小さな森を見つけたことから、リサーチを進めていくとその昔、一帯はオーク樹林が繁茂していたことを発見する。
今現在南ロンドンに存在する自然公園や森はその太古の森’Great North Wood’(グレートノースウッド)の生き残りだということだ。イギリスでは歴史的に森などの場所は公共の空間’Common’として使われており、人々は森の資源を使うことで農耕し家畜を育てて暮らしを成り立ててきた。森は人々の生活を支える基盤だったと言える。
しかし16、17世紀に入るとこういった場所を開拓して住居を建てようとする権力者も現れてくる。森が人々の生活から切り離される決定的政策が18世紀から19世紀ごろまで続いた’Enclosure Acts’である。この政策によって、森が住居地だったジプシー達は森から追い出され、森にはフェンスが張られ森と共に生きていた人々は生活基盤を森という土地から資本を生産することで生活基盤を作るシステムの中にある社会へと移行せざるおえなくなった。
今日地球温暖化など多くの環境問題がその姿を現す中で、私たち人間が事の重大さに気づけてないのは、ある意味でこの環境と共に生活する権利を奪われ、資本主義社会への移行したという歴史的背景が大きいと感じる。
私たちが今現在存在できているのは、地球という一つの主体の中で色んな生命体と交わっているからこそなのにも関わらず、私たちは多種多様の空間とはまた違うシステムの空間に存在している。そこには同じ空間にいるのに同じ空間ではない、すれ違いが生じているのではないだろうか。