In the contemporary art scene, artists are expected to manifest the aesthetic and social context of their works. In view of my own situation, I am basically interested in the strategy that artists use to make themselves understood in a foreign language. Does linguistic reformulation change their works and their personalities? In a world that is growing together due to globalization, society is becoming increasingly attentive to cultural differences. Artists who live a far away from their own culture for a long time lose their affiliation to their culture and develop – figuratively speaking – a nested cultural identity. Does this condition effect on the behavior of artists and their artistic formulations? Based on these questions, I have chosen the title of the project “Aufenthaltswahrscheinlichkeiten (Probabilities of Residence)” and have integrated a surprising fact that there are very few foreign artists living in my home country, Japan, into the exhibition project at the same time. Based on my own experiences in Hamburg, I first developed a list of 25 questions that I wanted to ask artists from other countries living in the Hanseatic city and record as an interview. To be able to record their voices acoustically protected, I built a small mobile and quickly assembled box and used it to visit the artists in their studios. When I was in the studio of Joe Sam-Essandoh, he noticed my plastic carrier bag with which I transported the recording box and started to laugh: “Do you know what this kind of carrier bag is called? These bags can often be found in stacks, in different sizes but always with a typical check pattern, in the many small household or souvenir shops in Hamburg, which are mostly operated by Mediterranean traders. I got the bag from Claus Böhmler, a former professor at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg as well as Fluxus artist, who developed a special interest in unusual everyday objects and collected them. He probably knew the significance of the bag – but for me it was only ideally suited for transporting large items at first. Before I met Joe, I didn’t know that it had a special name: The bag is called “Ghana must go”, since 1983, when the Nigerian president Shehu Shagari expelled over two million undocumented emigrants from his country. More than half of the emigrants originally came from Ghana and now returned home through Benin and Togo. They carried their belongings in the soft and stable carrier bags, which have been called “Ghana must go” worldwide since then and have even made it to a bestseller. When I travelled from studio to studio by Hamburg’s public transport in the summer of 2019 with this patterned bag for the project, it must have been a curious sight for passengers, especially for those who knew the story of “Ghana must go”: a slim Asian woman with a large bag on the way.

In this case, the bag is a plain object of daily use, at the same time, it projected different stories simultaneously. As a user of the bag, I realized that it has a wide-ranging significance for others as a transport tool. This allowed me to see my own situation as a Japanese woman in Hamburg from a new perspective. These everyday processes of exchange between people of different cultural backgrounds are deepening, changing and opening up my interest in the fates of initially strangers, who live in the same place I live in too – various worlds, perspectives and positions mix and overlap, almost like constantly forming new constellations. In quantum theory, it is assumed that the smallest particles constructing the world together, can be observed and determined, but they cannot be fixed because they are fleeting. In physics, the term “Aufenthaltswahrscheinlichkeiten” describes here and there, presence and absence at the same moment, stability and instability. Anyone with a temporary residence permit becomes restless before going to the “Aliens’ Office” to apply for a further residence permit. This raises the question: “What is the probability of getting an extension of residence permit?” If the physical world is based on probabilities, then only probabilities can be made about my fate. To put it in a nutshell: Can I stay, or do I have to pack my bags?

The artists participating in the project are from different countries and have developed very varied artistic positions. The works shown in Osaka were selected together with the artists. In the exhibition, I show a video, which is accompanied by a sound collage in German language from the interviews recorded in Hamburg. Simultaneously, the comments of the interviewees in the video can be read in Japanese script. These conversations in German between the artists and me are the talks by two person who was influenced by a different language culture background. The ambiguity that resulted from it turned into a fruitful exchange as stepping on each other. Should the exhibition concept – combining artworks, video, spoken and written language – contribute to understanding between the cultures and the twin cities, I would be delighted.

… They carefully wove wires around small electro-magnetic ferrite cores one-by-one, which also made it possible for the core rope memory to securely record program data. The person who programmed the Apollo mission computers was young female scientist working in a male-dominated field, Margret Hamilton, also known as the ‘Rope Mother’.
Since Apollo 17, which launched in 1972, humans have not since set foot on the moon, even though objects that were discarded by past astronauts still lay there. There is, however, something that remains on the moon that was not left by NASA, something ‘smuggled’. This is the ‘Moon Museum’ (1962), a 1.3cm x 1.9cm ceramic base on which are carved the drawings of six artists (Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, David Novros, Forrest Myers, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Chamberlain). Forrest Myers, who had an ambition to place a work of art on the moon, put the word out to his fellow artists to realize this minuscule project. Slipping through NASA’s net, it was attached to the leg of the Lunar Module and was deposited on the surface of the moon. This truly is a joyous story, but its validity is uncertain, and at this point in time it cannot be verified.

Let’s now turn our attention to this large installation, made up completely of new works by Naho Kawabe, that welcomes us to this exhibition’s gallery space. Rope, which is 1/300,000,000 the length of the distance between the earth and the moon, is suspended above as if to cut out the space, taking the form of a surface. The many black objects that dangle from the rope are based on the ‘Moon Museum’ drawings and have been hand-knitted by the artist. Via this kind of hand craft one is arrested by the sense of becoming mechanized as part of a production process, and this in turn can be seen as a repetition of the activities of the female factory workers who wove Apollo 11’s core rope memory.
Naho Kawabe lives and works both in Japan and Germany, and ‘boarders’ and ‘movement/ migration’ are two things that are inseparable to her life and expression. In fact, the Moon Landing which took place around 50 years ago and remains in the annuls of human history can also be regarded as the great movement between the earth and the moon, and similar concerns related to the work of women as seen in the Apollo mission are still running through modern society. Various historical facts and fictions have been weaved into Kawabe’s work, having fixed forms, transforming and disintegrating, and even being created anew. This exhibition’s title was given by Kawabe, with a reason existing behind it. However we can read the title as a clue when one comes face-to-face with her work. In other words…