TITLE:

Living Montage: The Margins of theField Research

AUTHOR(S):

Sawazaki, Kenichi

CITATION:

Sawazaki, Kenichi. Living Montage: The Margins of the Field Research.
といとうとい 2021, 0: 7.

ISSUE DATE:
2021-06-30

URL:
https://doi.org/10.14989/toitoutoi_00_7e
RIGHT:©2021 京都大学 学際融合教育研究推進センター; 投稿原稿の著作権は著者に属する。ただし原則としてCreative Commons (AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International) ライセンスを適用するものとする。

Living Montage: The Margins of the Field Research
Kenichi Sawazaki (Artist, Film director)

Field research is academic research that uses research techniques such as physically visiting
sites appropriate to the subject or theme of the research, directly observing the subject,interviewing the people involved, conducting questionnaires, and collecting historical
documents and materials in the field.
Sawazaki has been involved in producing and presenting contemporary artworks, but the
production of a documentary film about the activities of the French gardener Gilles Clément
led him to produce many videos documenting the fieldwork activities of Research Institutefor Humanity and Nature (RIHN) researchers in Japan and abroad. He has always beeninterested in exploring the expressive possibilities that arise from the experience of fieldwork.
This essay explores that artistic practice.

Artistic practices that treat the “margins” of the field as if they were the “centerpiece”

In the age of mechanical reproduction, the “Art Autonomy” became an issue when art nolonger had the “Cult Value” associated with religious beliefs, but the separate “ExhibitionValue”. But with the recent development of transportation and printing technology and theadvent of information technology, art autonomy from the social context can no longer beachieved, and many forms of artistic expression have emerged that deal with the relationshipto society and its margins. In this context, if there is something that characterizes art today, itis the way in which the artist concentrates his or her creativity on how to focus on social
phenomena and how to express these phenomena as art to draw society’s attention to them.
Art is nothing more than a view, a unique way of looking at the world that is already in frontof us.
In a lecture entitled On the Origin of the Work of Art in Mesology, geographer Augustin
Berque (1942-) attempted to explain Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) The Origin of the Workof Art (1935) in terms of the doctrine of Mesology or Umwelt. According to Berque,
Mesology is the doctrine of the relationship between man and nature, while Umwelt is thedoctrine of the relationship between living beings in general. The Subject (S) that underlies
the world has no meaning in itself for man and requires a certain process to give it meaning,
namely the predicate (P). This is expressed by Berque as S/P (S as P). The subject (S) appears
as the predicate (P).
As a more direct example, Berque cites Heidegger’s use of the image of a temple. The temple
was built on the rock, and through its work the world came forth as world. Where did it comefrom? It came from the world itself, as “something”. Without the work of this “something,” itwould not have appeared as a “something,” that is, it would have had no meaning, andtherefore it would not have existed. In the case of the temple, the ground (S), the foundation,
was used as the basis of the temple (P) so that the temple could exist. In the process ofconstructing the temple, the world appears as the world and takes on the meaning of being theworld. The temple is a work of architecture, a work of art. It functions as an “opening” forsomething that is an S. This is how we can explain the origin of the work of art.
Sawazaki has already mentioned that today’s art is characterized by the way in which theartist concentrates his or her creativity on how to focus on social phenomena and how to
express these phenomena as art to draw society’s attention to them. It can be argued thathuman imagination should be applied to “how” to “open” the world to be the world and how
to build a temple. The search for this “how” is a practice that has to do with the origin of thework of art.

And if we apply what we learn from Berque to fieldwork and look at it, we can see
something like the following.

At the researcher’s field site, in addition to the behaviors being studied, there is much“potential for shaping the future of society,” such as the wisdom, ingenuity, and surprise thatcan be seen in everyday life. Researchers are people with very advanced and specialized
knowledge and skills, but they also have the opportunity to learn much of this potential, andtheir results reflect some of these things. However, although we may feel that a very small
event has potential, it can only be described episodically in an academic paper, and thesensory and emotional experiences in particular are difficult to incorporate into an academic
format.
Is it possible to document such “potential” in fieldwork, that is easily positioned as being”marginal” to research findings in the academic context, through visual media and see it as“central,” sharing its potential as an object of appreciation and evaluation from a perspective
outside academic media? To paraphrase Berque: If it is the view of a field researcher that
“Opens” a “Way of Life (S)” as a “Way of Life with Diverse Potentials,” could we not create
another view to “Open” as a different “Way of Life” (P) by returning it back to the view ofthe researcher? The attempt in this work is an artistic “Return” to find a “Way” to “Open” theway of life of people seen by the researcher in fieldwork as having a rich potential, to besomething else.

A method born of a life in constant movement and having the “Eyes of the In-Between”

In Sawazaki’s experience, today’s way of life, where “life itself is in continuous movement”
rather than rooted in a particular place, impairs the sense of engagement with events. But
even in continuous motion, there are times when the relationship created by the camera

causes us to feel involved in the inevitability of the event. In this case, the relationship iscreated from the perspective of being “suspended” “in-between” when one is neither aninterested party or a non-interested party. We refer to this perspective as the “Eyes of the InBetween”.
Whether or not a person has directly experienced an event is the boundary line that separates
an interested party from a non-interested party. We can say that being “in-between” is anindirect experience of an event. Moreover, when we say “in-between” something andsomething else, that something and something else are qualitatively different. For example,
we could say that we have cross-cultural communication “between” different countries andpeoples, where the “Eyes of the In-Between” is “between” different things.
If one is to relate to events and cultural practices with which one is not directly involved, thismust be accompanied by one’s own active will, judgment, and action. Of course, this positive
attitude must be accompanied by a strong motivation, such as the desire to experiencesomething. The “Eyes of the In-Between” is a view that sits between two different visualsystems, but is not dependent on either, and yet “tries to see things positively.”This happens whenever you try something out. When people from different cultures spend
time building a relationship with each other, we can expect that the interaction between thesecultures will produce a different culture, a mixture of both. But if this creates a solidcommunity, then there is no more “in-between” in the situation. For this reason, the “Eyes ofthe In-Between” contains the feeling of being suspended in the air before different things
mix.
In relation to this “Eyes of the In-Between”, Sawazaki has been exploring ways to use video
to get people to reflect on their experiences in the field related to fragmented “life itself” byrecording their lives, without drawing them into a particular narrative or theme, or assuming
an ending as we do in our own lives. The most important element is the “horizontal montage”
approach, which does not allow the viewer to determine the meaning of the images.
The term “horizontal montage” was coined by film critic André Bazin (1918-1958) as an
editing technique with voiceover and was used by Chris Marker (1921-2012) in Letter from
Siberia (1958). In Marker’s film, the same sequence of images is repeated like a broken
record, with various commentaries inserted into the sequence through voiceover.
If we were to apply this to the work in this essay, we would suggest that a “horizontal” edit,
in which different narrative texts, such as the perspectives of the researchers, locals, andcameraman, are inserted into repeatedly collected video sequences using voiceovers, would
be appropriate to “suspend” the perspective of the subject of the film. This is because by
narrating the same experience of the field from different perspectives, the experiencefluctuates beyond a single interpretation.

The varied video work #manazashi

#manazashi(124min, 2021), a video work that uses methods from the “Eyes of the InBetween”, is based on footage documenting various human activities in Africa and Southeast
Asia, the site of research by agronomist Ueru Tanaka and cultural anthropologist Takao
Shimizu. To capture the “margins” of the field, Sawazaki filmed the field as fragmented
scenes that could not be assembled into clear narratives or themes, and then added uniquecuts and post-processing to create a varied film.
There are two narrators in this work. The first is the cameraman, who records the activities ofpeople in the field and murmurs about his own experiences, and the second is the viewer,
who watches and speculates on the footage shot by the cameraman. Both narrators try tocreatively read and understand their own visual experiences, which sometimes overlap andinclude fictional transformations as in a novel.
In this essay, Sawazaki presents the video work “After the Rain, Horizontally, On theStreet”(10min, 2021), which is a re-edited version of part of the work #manazashi.

A <site> to think about “Ways of Life” through video

At the heart of today’s video experience is what we ourselves record and edit in our daily
lives; we see the fragmented images we ourselves record. Therefore, #manazashi, which wascreated in the same way, asks the viewer what kind of creativity lies in the everyday act of“recording, editing, and viewing videos” and what this visual experience means for humansociety.
In the context of contemporary society, the boundaries between “moving” and “where you
belong and live” are intertwined and indistinguishable.” #manazashi aims to capture thetension between “living” and video work in the process of “moving” through different
realms, both physical and mental. It is an attempt to find a <site> to think about something byusing the mechanisms of video rather than viewing the video for a specific purpose. This
attempt will be continued in Living Montage.
Living Montage proposes a new model of visual media and viewing experience in relation tofieldwork. The practice begins with a <site> where these three things are compatible: thedocumentation of specific investigations by fieldworkers over time, the perceptual
representation of what is in the “margins” that become visible as a result of the investigations,and the artistic expression that is primarily concerned with such “margins.” Living Montage
has been built as a platform, like a toolbox, to collect video footage of different people in as
many fields as possible and document their human activities, and the products that emerge
from the toolbox according to context and audience have been created...
Living Montage needs to be a more flexible and playful platform that, while starting fromartistic practice and academic research, does not further restrict itself to these contexts. Thisis because we believe that only a playful approach to visual media will allow “marginal”

experiences in the field to bring new perspectives to artistic practice and academia. Living
Montage is a <site> where we can think about our own “Life” through video, without being
limited to a specific field.