Two Seas
by Ikuru Kuwajima
portfolio winners call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023', 2023
Category: Anthropology and Territories
The concept of the project is based on the text of a Konigsberg-born architect Bruno Taut who escaped from the Nazi prosecution in the 1930’s and spent the rest of his life in Japan and Turkey. While traveling along the Japanese northwestern coast, he discovered that the Japanese landscape — the thatched roofs, sand, pine trees and sea — resembled the Baltic coast around his homeland East Prussia, now divided into Lithuania, Poland and Russia. A few years ago I followed the footsteps of Taut in Japan and found Taut’s impression still relevant. Later I photographed along the Baltic coastline, made photo-based paper collages, applying traditional Japanese Chigirie technique. The series of the triptychs is my interpretation of the gaze of the exiled architect nostalgically remembering the Baltic coastline from the other shore in Asia on the threshold of WWII, which drastically changed the geography of the Baltic region afterward.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023