“Rikomape” is a resumption of the reverence for the deities of the meandering river flows. During the urban development of Tokyo, the river Tone, like many others, had its flow completely transposed by a 60-year-long construction project. Its uncontrollable force was redirected and contained, ignoring where Tone’s spirit wanted to go.
Of Ainu origin, the word rikomape means “a river that climbs up the mountain”, expressing an opposite and interspecific force of the river. This word was transformed into a sound, using the artist’s sound theory created in collaboration with the musician Tatsuro Murakami. Along with the word rikomape, the color of the weed nanohana (菜の花), which has been growing along the course of the Tone River since before its modification, was also transformed into a sound.
The sound resumes the cosmological cycle of rikomape and is played in a continuous flow through a looped cassette tape. The work deals with the recreation and resumption of cosmological relations with the flow of the waters, the worship of the rivers, and the autonomy of their spirits, tracing a path that the artist calls the “ecology of beyond”
Exhibition photos by Naoki Takehisa
