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Spatial Bodies

AUJIK

Living buildings: a dystopian city inspired to the metabolism movement.


Inspired by metabolic architecture and Hashima/Gunkan-jima, an abandoned former coal mining facility on a constructed island outside of Nagasaki, Spacial Bodies is a striking, one of a kind video by the Kyoto based esoteric group AUJIK.

As the authors declare: "Spatial Bodies depicts the urban landscape and architectural bodies as an autonomous living and self replicating organism. Domesticated and cultivated only by its own nature. A vast concrete vegetation, oscillating between order and chaos."

In the video we observe buildings spreading, growing like plants one to another, climbing to the clouds, bending and twisting, like living organism stretching in the space: order and chaos, concrete and lymph, it may be said that there's a not-so-subtle dystopian vibe in this video, enhanced by the Daisuke's soundscape, inspired to Japanese electronic pioneers, such as Ryuichi Sakamoto and Nobukazu Takemura. In one interview for DIS magazine, one of the authors claimed that, fascinated by the post-apocalyptic aura of Gunkan, which reminded him of other abandoned spaces such as Pripyat near Chernobyl, he started to think about making work inspired by this neglected, forgotten atmosphere. This desire overlapped with his renovated interest in the metabolism and its approach, which he found not so far from the Dada and surrealist movement: its utopian and absurd vision for the future offered him the inspiration for creating Spatial Bodies.

From the tragic story of Lee Guō, a taiwanese architect, member of the metabolism movement who was commissioned to build an hospital in Taichung city by the Chinese government and ended being sentenced to prison, his building tore down with no photos available, to the Kiyonori Kikutake and Kisho Kurokawa's architectural visionary projects, to the "wiggly" concept that everything is interconnected even though we usually cannot perceive it that way with our eyes, to the use of the 3D technique, AUJIK's Spatial Bodies is a video rich of inspirations, that should be explored, layer after layer.

(Story by Sara Marzullo, The Architecture Player)

Credits

Location: Osaka, Japan
Music: Daisuke Tanabe

Japan 2016
Duration: 4'13"