慶應義塾大学アート・センター　Keio University Art Center

Vistas, Intervals, Apertures　Presentation of Film 'For an Open Campus' and Talk

Date

Monday 27 August, 2018, 19:00-20:30

Venue

Keio University Art Center (Keio University Mita Campus, South Annex)
2-15-45, Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 108-8345 / JR Tamachi sta.

Audience

Open to anyone

Cost

Admission free

Booking

No booking required

Lecturer/Performer

Graham Ellard

Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone
As artists Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone have collaborated since 1993. Their large-scale video installations and 16mm films, concerned with the parallels between film and architecture have been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries including; MoCA, Sydney; Tate Liverpool; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Chicago Architecture Foundation; Rotterdam International Film Festival. Recently their films have been included in Glass! Love! Perpetual Motion! Anthology Film Archives, New York; Assembly: A survey of recent artists’ film and video in Britain 2008-2013, Tate Britain; as a parallel exhibition to the Aichi Triennale, Nagoya; the Setouchi Triennale, Japan; The Laszlo Moholy Nagy Retrospective, The Guggenheim Museum, New York.
They also write together and their book 'Anthony McCall: Notebooks and Conversations' was published in March 2015 by Lund Humphries, London and New York/Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland.

Website (external link)

Enquiries and bookings

Keio University Art Center
​03-5427-1621

pj.ca.oiek.c-tra@sevihcra

Organiser(s)

Organised by: Keio University Art Center (Contemporary Art Research Seminar)

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Film 'For an Open Campus'

Shot over the months of October and November 2014 on the campus of Aichi University of the Arts in Japan, ‘For an Open Campus’ is an immersive diary-form film that explores the extraordinary architecture and everyday social life of this campus world designed by Junzo Yoshimura and opened in 1966.

Shot on 16mm film and employing both static and roving hand‐held cameras the film revels in an accumulation of incidental quotidian detail, from students walking between lecture hall and studio, to students dismantling the hand‐made and makeshift huts and canteens constructed for a festival. This activity is interwoven with extended sequences of a small group of students working together; focused, silent, and completely immersed in the making of a large‐scale drawing and model landscape of the campus itself. Filmed close‐up in flooding sunlight these sections of the film are a study in total absorption.

At the same time, the film draws attention to the formal organisation of the buildings and the centrality of orchestrated sight lines and paths of circulation. The emphasis here is on the way Yoshimura played with parallax, simultaneity and multiple and constantly changing views ‐ constructed in particular through the frames provided by the canopied walkways and the piloti of the massive raised lecture building ‐ in order to produce an experience of the campus as a set of ambiguous and changing relationships. Drawing on this vocabulary, the film is structured around a number of simple formal relationships: in general between inside and outside; in particular between vistas, frames intervals, voids, enclosures, apertures and solids.

While the architecture of the campus is extraordinary, the main lecture theatre looking like a massive multi‐legged animal moving through the undulating landscape, Yoshimura claimed that the ultimate success of a design resided in the way people used a building:

“I am gladdened when I have completed a building and can see people having a good life inside it. To walk past a single house at twilight, with bright light shining inside the house, being able to sense that the family enjoys their daily life; isn’t that the most rewarding moment for an architect?”

The film captures the campus at an extraordinary moment in its history. Poised for change it awaits a major re‐building programme ‐ the estate in gentle neglect as plants, trees and wildlife slowly encroach, while academic and social life continues regardless.

• ‘For an Open Campus’ was produced with the generous support of:
• Aichi University of the Arts, Nagoya, Japan.
• The Graham Foundation, Chicago, USA.
• The Elephant Trust, London.
• Goldsmiths University of London.
• Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

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