When danger becomes fun I taru Kato Fuminori Hoshino and Yuu Yoshida of the hyslom collective in conversation with Agnieszka Sural

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 differ ent. 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 depend ence 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 mem bers 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 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.

insofar that we improvise, operate ad hoc, in response to a situation encoun tered in nature. We don‘t preplan our actions.

What does play mean to you?

IK: Play involves pleasure and a suffering effort. It is a response and reaction to a new situation, a push beyond your limits. One time we went out during a typhoon. A storm was raging. You could hardly stand and breathe. In such situations you get to know your own body. If there are three of you, you get to know them closer. If you hold hands, it‘s easier to resist the wind. In a trio, even tough, painful, or dangerous experiences become nice. When you share risk, danger becomes fun.

What did you do while in residence in Warsaw?

YY: When we came here for the first time in 2016, some artists from Indo nesia were also in residence. We spent time together and took part in the pro gramme organized by the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art curators. We were shown various places, such as the tractor factory in Ursus. Nearby we found a boat that, as it turned out, was being built by homeless people from a nearby shel ter. We got to know the construction manager and future captain of “Father Bogusław”, Mr. Waldemar Rzeźnicki. We learned that in the following year, when the boat would be finished, its builders intended to use it to sail around the world. Then we decided that we‘d return to Ursus.

I‘ve heard you got employed there.

YY: We asked the boat captain, if we could help and he said yes. Together with homeless people and master shipbuilders, we were building “Father Bogusław.” We worked for two weeks, every day from nine to five. None of us spoke English, but we communicated through gestures and learned each other‘s languages.

IK: The captain from Ursus helped us find a cheap boat that we later used to travel down from Warsaw to Gdańsk. We already had motor boat licences, having done projects on rivers in Osaka and Nagoya. We sailed for two weeks, making stops at various places. We documented all our activities, marking the places visited and routes covered on a map.

FH: In the meantime, we had taken part in an exhibition at the Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen, which fea tured another Japanese artist, Yukawa Nakayasu. One of the elements of his installation was a large stone. When we saw that, we felt nostalgia. We‘d once found a similar stone in a river in Kyoto and used it in our performances. We brought it back every time, but two years later it disappeared. The river had carried it away or someone had taken it. It was so large the three of us could barely lift it.

Then you decided that one day you‘d take the Copenhagen stone with you.

IK: We looked at the map and saw that we could get to the Vistula by sea. When the captain heard about our plans for the stone, he organised a crew, a yacht, and we sailed from Gdańsk to Copenhagen and back.

Itte kaette: Back and Forth is the title of your show at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, opening in December 2019. What does its first part –Itte kaette exactly mean?

YY: In Japanese, itte kaette is a con nective construction where a second verb defines the tense of the first. It‘s a construction which means that someone has gone and come back. Or to go and come back. Literally, itte is outside, kaette inside. For us, this is

immanent repetition. We‘ve recently been travelling a lot on various routes, and the repetitiveness of these motions inspired the title. It made our curator, Anna Ptak, think of Albert Camus‘s The Myth of Sisyphus.

At some point, I felt a shift in the cen tre of gravity that is marked as home on the mental map. I return home to Warsaw and leave Japan. It turns out that various places can be your home. This situation can be compared with the work of Sisyphus. It‘s hard work, but with a shifted centre of gravity the goal is not to roll the boulder up, but to let it roll down.

Working with racing pigeons has been one of your long-term projects. Will birds feature in the Ujazdowski Castle exhibition?

IK: At the Castle we met the cleaner, Mr. Mariusz, and his pigeons. We meet regularly. The plan for the trip is to build a dovecote and take it along. On the way to Copenhagen and back we‘ll be stopping by and borrowing pigeons to release them after two hundred yards. It‘s interesting that pigeons swallow stones to aid digestion.

What‘s the attitude towards pigeons in Japan?

What are you planning for the show?

IK: Before the trip for the stone, we are participating in the exhibitions Celebrations in Poznań and Szczecin, devoted to the centenary of Pol ish-Japanese diplomatic relations. We‘ll present performances there and show a few objects related to the stone. We‘ll create a space where we‘ll be able to receive it. In Warsaw, the exhibition will be based on our meetings with various people, a documentation of encounters with the landscape, with animals, and the stone trip. We will work physically with the stone.

YY: We also want to show works from our ten years‘ practice. All our projects are somehow connected. Now we‘ve found a stone we interact with, like we used to explore that construction site. It‘s about becoming familiar with matter, interacting with it.

What will happen to the stone next?

IK: The show concludes in March 2020. At this time the water level on the Vistula should be high enough for us to be able to sail to Gdańsk. If the timing is right. From there we‘d perhaps like to take it to Sapporo, where we‘re doing our next project.

YY: Ordinary pigeons are dirty, disgusting, but racing pigeons are different. They are nice to touch, they have different eyes.

You spoke about deadlines. Mankind is also facing one. Various experts give us nine, twelve or thirty years. How does hyslom see itself in a decade from now?

YY: What I wish for are closer relations, less distance, and more dialogue. Not only within the collective, but among people in general.

Formed in 2009, hyslom consists of Itaru Kato, Fuminori Hoshino, and Yuu Yoshida. The periodic exploration of developed land and encounters with people and objects there, as well as a sense of incongruity resulting from these experiences, serve as a basis for their artistic expression. hyslom turns “field-play”, their method for physically and playfully experiencing a given environment, into video, photography, and performative artwork. The group further develops the memories of “field-play” into a wide array of other media, including sculpture, theatre, and film. In collaboration with Hideo Nin, a well-known figure in the world of racing pigeons, hyslom became a member of the Japan Racing Pigeon Association under the name Nin-hyslom Hatosha (Nin-hyslom Pigeon Home), in 2015. hyslom also organises workshops and exhibitions related to racing pigeons, thus gradually merging the roles of care takers and artists.

Their residency at U–jazdowski follows their previous research visits (in 2016 and 2017) devoted to exploring the power that human body, as well as that of an animal, plant or a bird, gains in relation to the elements. At a slow pace and mindful towards the environment translated through bodily experience, hyslom followed the Vistula River towards the sea, worked in Ursus alongside builders of the gaff schooner “Ojciec Bogusław”, and returned by land to Japan. The “field-play” exploring the dynamics between various kinds of selves has taken shape in these different activities of hyslom in Poland and it will be documented and presented in the exhibition Itte kaette: Back and Forth at U–jazdowski in December 2019.

Dawid Misiorny ur. 1985 w Poznaniu. Absolwent Wydziału Kulturoznawstwa Uni- wersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu oraz Intermediów na Wydziale Komunikacji Multimedial- nej Uniwersytetu Artystycznego w Poznaniu. Student Interdyscy- plinarnych Studiów Doktoranckich Uniwersytetu Artystycznego w Po- znaniu. Jego prace pokazywane były na wystawach indywidualnych w ramach Miesiąca Fotografii w Krakowie, w Galerii Piekary w Poznaniu, Obrońców Stalingradu 17 w Szczecinie oraz na wystawach zbiorowych m. in. w ramach Biennale Fotografii w Poznaniu i Galerii Bunkier Sztuki w Krakowie. W latach 2012–2013 współpra- cował z Self Publish, Be Happy w Londynie. W latach 2014–2017 prowadził wydawnictwo Magenta poświęcone współczesnej fotogra- fii. Tworzy obiekty, instalacje, dzia- łania performatywne, najbardziej rozpoznawalny jest jako fotograf. www.dawidmisiorny.tumblr.com

Dawid Misiorny born in 1985 in Poznan. A graduate of Cultural Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and of Department of Intermedia at the Faculty of Media Arts at the University of the Arts in Poznan. A student of Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies at the University of the Arts in Poznan. His works were shown at solo exhibitions as part of Krakow Photomonth Festival, Piekary Gallery in Poznan, Obroncow Stalingradu 17 in Szczecin, and at group exhibitions as part of the Poznan Biennale of Photography and Bunkier Gallery of Contemporary Art. Between 2012 and 2013 he collaborated with Self Publish, Be Happy in London. Between 2014 and 2017 he edited Magenta magazine dedicated to contemporary photography. He makes objects, installations and performances, but he is most recognisable as a photographer. www.dawidmisiorny.tumblr.com

Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski [Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art] Jazdów 2, 00-467 Warszawa www.u–jazdowski.pl