℃ - Aqua - Ignis
2012.9.
An integrated resort facility built in Komono Town, Mie Prefecture
Works installed on the front wall of "Aqua Ignis"
℃-Aqua-Ignis
The material I choose for my artwork is thermometers which we are supposed to have used once in our lives. However, the thermometers have no scale marks, and you can’t read temperature. Tens and hundreds of this specific type of thermometers are lined up on the walls, and the temperature forms a horizontal line. When touched by a human hand, the warmth moves the line to make a peak, and as the hand removed, it goes back to the original state. The line also moves with the sunshine streaming through foliage. I have made a variety of thermometer works so far. The horizontal lines formed by the thermometers are ceaselessly going up and down right at this moment somewhere. I believe that my job is to visualize the world over temperature through thermometers in one form or another.
For ℃-Aqua-Ignis, the thermometers with red liquid and blue liquid are lined up on the walls, as the red ones in the upper position and the blue ones lower by 5cm in the room where the air-conditioner is set at 26℃. Here appear the red and blue straight horizontal lines. The blue line is meant for Aqua, as the red one for Ignis. And there is another element added. The staff and a visitor at the gallery shake hands holding a thermometer in their hands. The temperature of the thermometer goes up, and at the point of the highest temperature a flag is put, so that a flag line is made. The line is the memories and records of the body temperature of those who are there. The temperature is not something visible, but it is definitely everywhere. Some of it is generated as a landscape of environmental temperature once the thermometers are set on the walls. The memories and records added to the space by the body temperature of the two people indicate the fact that we radiate heat and makes us imagine how Aqua, Ignis, and we are existing in the space.
Translation Ayumi Kudo
ⒸSHIGERU MOROIZUMI