: shadows on stilts | takeuma no aida no kagee | 竹馬の間の影絵 :

august 2014 >> ongoing
oruta | naha & urasoe | okinawa | japan

What rests between buildings that we don’t normally see?

What is always there, in the city, but appears to be invisible?

When walking across a city that is to us familiar we tend to take places and spaces for granted. The pavement is always there, so we no longer see it, nor what has changed since we last walked past. The shops, the trees, the cars, the buildings, even the people, tend to become blurred if we don’t stop and look at them through different eyes, the eyes of an observer…

“What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?

Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.”
― Georges Perec, L’infra Ordinaire

[ shadows on stilts ]  is a journey through everyday spaces in some cities in Okinawa. It records mundane episodes across the island through video, drawing and shadow puppetry. Short videos were recorded by luísa alpalhão as moving postcards documenting neglected spaces, everyday invisible spaces. Those formed the basis of a story, a narrative about this unusual island where warmth doesn’t merely result from the constant heat, but from the hospitality of the people who inhabit it. The films were the starting point for a series of workshops were children from ORUTA and their families went on a journey through familiar places and habits that form part of their everyday. Those were initially represented through drawings and found objects collected around Urasoe’s Art Museum and eventually led to the characters of a shadow puppetry performance that had the short films as the scenario for the different narratives. The children were both the designers and makers of the different elements that started a journey through the documented neglected spaces.

This initial work is the basis for a ‘book in progress’, Still Walking, a journey through Okinawa’s everyday spaces that intends to be the foundation for a new shadow puppetry performance for a mobile theatre in Naha in 2015.

[ shadows on stilts ] was only possible with the kind help of Titus Spree, Aska Inoue, Taeko, Maiko and all other ORUTA members and children.

a-un : who? | luísa alpalhão

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agosto 2014 >> a decorrer  
oruta | naha & urasoe | okinawa | japão 

a-un : quem? | luísa alpalhão