Tadashi Kawamata Twists and Turns

Every worksite orchestrated by Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata is an adventure, an experience where you can come across the essence of art at first hand. Here, summer peregrinations with the artist.

In July 2018 I spent a fortnight with Tadashi Kawamata in the south-west of France. I had invited him to work on three very different projects: a personal exhibition, in a rather classical form, at the Villa Beatrix Enea in Anglet, in the Basque Country, between Bayonne and Biarritz; an installation of wooden sticks, invading the entire exhibition space of Château Malromé near Langon, southeast of Bordeaux ; finally, a monumental project in Anglet again, but this time on the ocean shore, as part of the 7th Anglet International Biennial of Contemporary Art, devoted to the theme of love under the title Chambres d’Amour [Love Rooms], of which I was the curator that year. Our adventure quickly took the form of a road trip, and I was able to appreciate quite closely the way the Japanese artist works.

In the run-up to the Anglet Biennial, during the summer I organised two exhibitions under the title Antichambres, devoted respectively to Tadashi Kawamata and Stéphane Pencréac’h, which were held at the Villa Beatrix Enea and the Galerie Georges-Pompidou, in the urban part of Anglet. Kawamata’s works arrived at the same time as the artist, whom we welcomed with Lydia Scappini, in charge of art in Anglet. Everything went very quickly, because he had a very clear vision of how he wanted to show his works. Entitled

(I) Love Tower, this exhibition is devoted to the many projects that have taken the form of towers, since what he plans to do for the Anglet Biennial is a tower perched on top of a cliff.The exhibition is thus made up of twodimensional models projects developed on large plywood slabs, and scale models of past and future towers. At the entrance stands the model of the Scheiterturm built in 2013 at the Charterhouse in Ittingen, Switzerland. The tower, which was built from the stacking of 12,000 logs, is inspired by old wood pyres and evokes the subsistence economy of monks, whose activity was devoted to the exploitation and sale of firewood. Although they are inspired by ancient architectural forms (as in Ittingen, where the stacking refers to the early days of architecture), Kawamata’s towers sometimes have a modern origin, such as the Collective Folie, probably the most “risky” of all his projects, built in the Parc de la Villette in Paris (2013); it calls to mind Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument

to the Third International. The artist has been particularly generous, creating a large number of works for Anglet, notably theocean tower, which we will come back to later.