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When danger becomes fun Itaru Kato, Fuminori Hoshino, and Yuu Yoshida of the hyslom collective tell Agnieszka Sural about the Japanese art scene, the field play method, stones and pigeons, but also about risk-taking and testing limits. AS: This year marks the tenth anniversary of hyslom. How did it start? IK: We met at the Kyoto University of Arts, where I studied Textile Design, while Fuminori and Yuu were doing an Architecture course. After graduation, we all went back home. We are from different towns. One day I saw through a window of my parents‘ house that a mountain which used to stand there had disappeared. Instead, there was a fence and an announcement about an upcoming residential district. This was in 2009. We entered the construction site on a Sunday, this being the only day no work was going on there. The first thing we saw was a huge pile of trees that had been felled there. We returned there every Sunday for the next ten years, and each time the landscape was different. Our collective was formed, but we didn‘t think about it like we were doing an art project for an exhibition. It was just field play, and using the opportunity to shoot videos and take pictures. What does hyslom mean? FH: We published the photos and videos taken during the weekly field plays on the website hanareproject. net, which is run by the Kyoto-based Social Kitchen. Then the need arose for a name. We called those practices on the mountain “Documentation of Hysteresis.” Hysteresis is the dependence of the state of a system on its
history. When you stretch a piece of rubber and let it go, it contracts and returns, but not to the same position. That‘s how we imagined our practices on the mountain, where things were constantly changing and were never like before. The collective‘s name is a compound of “hysteresis” and “slalom”. The natural conditions of the mountain are slopes and cliffs, which we circumvented slalom-like. How do you collaborate? YY: At the beginning we didn‘t think about our joint practices as work, we did it spontaneously and for fun. When different people had started inviting us to exhibitions and paying us for it, the term “deadline” came into play. The deadline by which you need to think over and decide everything, and even to organise or fix something. This was no longer just fun. So the conditions to which we have to adapt have changed. IK: What is important for us is to share everything. We take care of everything together. There are no assigned roles like in a music band, where one person writes the lyrics, another composes the music, and a third one sings. Even if such task-delegation would save us time, it is more important to experience together. You call your artistic method field play. FH: Play not in the literal sense, but as a neologism. Anthropologists have field work, and we do field play through art practice. There are no rules, so it‘s not a game. It‘s about going outside and playing. YY: The word play relates also to the 1980s Osaka collective Play. Its members organised all kinds of outdoor events. They built a wooden structure on a hill and waited for a lightning to strike it. They found some road signs, made them into a raft, and rafted down a river. Hyslom differs from them
