Komorebi, moving Toucans and feeling bamboo at Castellani House

Extracts from Left Morning on the River by Cosmata Lindie; right top - Toco Toucan: Psychosis Series by Roberto Teekah; Right bottom Golden Sun by Elodie Cage Smith

Komorebi (木漏れ日)

Rickeisha Perreira stands on dry bamboo leaves in front of blue butterflies and reads her poem Komorebi. 

She explains that Komorebi is a Japanese word meaning 'sunlight leaking through the trees'.  

The room is bright,  but the work around features different amounts of sunlight related to the jungle.

We are at Immersion:Into the Jungle  ,   the jungle represented by 35 different artists.  

The jungle imagined with jaguars, different birds, not too many people, rivers, waterfalls , plants , snakes, underwater, above ground , dark, light, flowers.

And the experience of looking at Morning on the River and standing up and imagining what it would be like coming down the river watching the deer watching the people. The painting kind of draws you in,  but I would have to be quiet, maybe turn into a water spirit which could move so that the deer would not be afraid of me and run away.

And this exhibition offers the augmented reality experience, where it is possible to watch what would happen if the items on the art works moved.

Moving Toucans

 A friend says 'eh eh' , you see dis is how it start " when I send the video to her of a two toucans flying away from a piece by Jaideo Nankissore "Ramphastidae".  I know, easy to be trapped into watching the works through the phone. This is 2024 and people keep talking and asking about please, drop the phones, stop recording the shows and concerts and distress and so on, and be involved in well the reality.

But , the AR is also a kind of art itself. And so the toucans move, fly away, and the water falls.  And this is what would happen maybe if I had gone into this painting as toucans might have heard me and been disturbed.

 

 The artists collaborated with the organising team to derive the AR experiences. The organising team are Maharanie Jhillu  - Lead Project Coordinator & Artistic Director, Akash Bridgemohan - Project Coordinator and Engineer; and Pekahiah James, the Curator. 

There is a certain power in this inter-disciplinary collaboration, of  'art' and 'tech'. I know used to come to the 'art' to escape from the 'tech' but this collaboration brings out other possibilities.

The internet is a bit slow, so I am staring through the phone at a tile by Lisa Thompson with another Toucan. The toucan turns and looks at me and I jump.

So I move around the room, holding phone with both hands so that it doesn't fall down,  butterflies moving, macaw flying ,  jaguar and cows walking, flowers dissolving, heads turning, savannah grass on the ground..

 Listening to the poem by Cynthia Malone and imagining what music might come from Ohene Koama's Jungle Noise (and promising that I might go play around with the AR and just do it myself.. make my own music to the painting)

At some point though, I say nah nah, stop.  I am not seeing the works, the details. Something about the eye of Toco Toucan, looking the viewer while the viewer looks at it and this thing about how we see things, wonder about reality, what is reality.

I see the Golden Sun by Elodie Cage Smith and the detail of the sun looks like another eye to me. In looking through the phone , taking pictures, standing far away, it is easy to miss details, to experience details.

Much as in real life. 

The immersion though is not only sight and hearing, there is touch.

feeling Bamboo

In addition to the possibility of standing barefoot on the dry bamboo leaves , there is an opportunity to touch one of Maharanie Jhillu's pieces which uses bamboo. 

Normally there is a 'Do Not Touch' rule, so this encouragement to touch is different.

Touch the wall, touch different parts of the piece and you can hear the different animal sounds.  

It is kind of like hugging the piece in a way.

My body feels stiff, hoping that I would not press too hard and break anything.

But in the reality in which we live, trees, plants, the forest.. hugging is good well except for the plants with plimpla (thorns) or ants and so on them.. 

but hugging really is the ultimate immersion, the being one with the natural environment.

So I might go back to try again..

The exhibition continues until 17th December, 2024 .

 

(Correction made on 14 Dec, 2024 to clarify the organising team)