Tree Huts / Connecting terrace / Wooden walkway
Artistic projects
Tadashi Kawamata is determining the nature of his projects little by little on the basis of a careful discovery, both physical and mental, of history, landscape and architecture, along with the ways of life they give rise to. Often it is a walkway – a link between past and present, between one population and another – which he designs in wood, his favourite material.
Tadashi Kawamata is installing three tree huts in the Grounds of the Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire. The design of each of these small shelters is different, depending on the tree it is perched in. With “Promenade sous les arbres” [Connecting terrace], the artist invites visitors to walk “from tree to tree”. He constructs wooden walkways, pathways beneath the trees in the grounds, giving another dimension to the perception of the natural surrounding space.
The “Promontoire sur la Loire” [Wooden walkway] installation is a suspended walkway made of wood, offering a spectacular and unusual view of the River Loire and its banks, which are classified as a Unesco world heritage site.
Each of these installations offers visitors the experience of really immersing themselves in nature and the landscape.
Biographical details
Tadashi Kawamata is a Japanese visual artist who was born in 1953 on the island of Hokkaido. Nowadays, he lives and works in Tokyo and Paris.
He very quickly made a name for himself on both the Japanese and international artistic scene. Already, at the age of 28, as a young graduate of the Tokyo Fine Arts University, he was invited to the Japanese Pavilion at the 1982 Venice Biennale. From then on, he has been involved in work all over the world, creating architectural projects, which always fit in perfectly with the site they adorn.
His work provides a reflection on social context and human relations. When he installed shelters made of recycled materials (wood, cardboard) on the outskirts of the cities of Montreal, New York or Tokyo, he was making references to shantytowns and the homeless. In Alkmaar, it was people with social problems who were associated with a walkway project, linking the community reintegration centre to the city. In all his projects, the artist surrounds himself with students, local inhabitants and groups who get involved in setting up and creating the work.
Urban planning issues are the basis of his work. Building or demolition sites, intermediate areas that survive in the urban space are taken over by the artist who uses the materials already on the site for his constructions, by “recycling” them (chairs, boats, scaffolding). Thus, in Kassel, it was a ruined church, destroyed by the Second World War and neglected when the city was rebuilt, which he gave back to the citizens at the time of Documenta VIII in 1987. Time, as an indicator of the greatness or decline of a building or a site, is a key element in his work.
His interventions recreate bridges between past and present, revealing the emotional side of things which cannot be seen, but also their material reality. Sharing work and reflecting on the living community, which brings life to each of his projects and is their foundation, encourage the awakening of this memory. In the Saint-Louis Chapel of the Salpêtrière Hospital in 1997, “Le passage des chaises” [The Passage of chairs] comprised a mound of chairs and church pews rising up in a spiral towards the dome of the chapel. In Barcelona in 1996, a walkway linked the Contemporary Art Museum to the old quarter. In Évreux in 2000, pedestrians were invited to walk around the town hall square using an elevated walkway, allowing them to change their viewpoint. In Saint-Thélo, in the Côtes-d’Armor area, he took over some old weavers’ cottages which were condemned to be demolished for three summers (from 2004 to 2006).
He was a lecturer at the Tokyo Fine Arts University from 1999 to 2005 and he currently teaches at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts [National Fine Arts School] in Paris. In 2005, he was appointed artistic director of the second Yokohama Triennale in Japan. His recent projects have brought him to France to take part in the Nantes < > Saint-Nazaire ESTUARY artistic route and the first Bordeaux Biennale, evento 2009, and to Japan for a personal retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.
