2026

Text distributed at the "Stacking Bags" exhibition For the past few years, I've been creating artwork while contemplating time. Among the sculptural acts of stacking, the simplest method can be considered a record of accumulated time and actions. In February and March, I went abroad for training, simply to see what I wanted to see, and reflected on the sculptures created through stacking and the human time invested in them. A stone castle built by one person over a lifetime / A brick castle collapsing due to its hasty construction / A mountain of garbage bags that grows taller day by day as residents pile them up On March 8th, the day I arrived in Paris, there was a strike regarding the pension system. The station was blocked shortly after my arrival, forcing me to walk. Broken glass was scattered throughout the city, and I could see flames in the distance. The strike was intense on the first night, but I didn't encounter any further riots during my stay. However, something I didn't notice at first was that the number of garbage bags in the city was increasing day by day. A strike by garbage collectors caused trash cans throughout the city to overflow, resulting in piles of black garbage bags on the streets. Even after returning home, images of the ever-growing piles of garbage bags spread on social media, visualizing the escalation of feelings and frustrations over time. If I had been there, I would have been preoccupied with sanitation issues such as foul odors and rats, and wouldn't have had time to think about anything else. Shortly after returning home, I learned from the news that the piles of garbage bags had been set on fire. What I witnessed firsthand at the time of the incident, later transformed into a real-time form of protest, viewed from a distant land across the sea, without the ability to smell or touch it. The "piling up bags," somewhat stripped of their rawness, possessed a certain allure as a sculptural object rising over time, and I felt guilty for forgetting the underlying problems. The difference between the real thing (and its surrounding environment) and the smooth visual information seen through a screen reminded me of the inability to truly reach the real thing when creating a sculpture. I've always disliked this feeling of unreachability, and sometimes I think there's no need to even try to reach it. But I was able to carve the weight of the pebbles and the bag I leaned on, tracing the surface from bottom to top. It's a roundabout way, but perhaps building up each concrete shape, accumulating actions and time, is one way to bridge a small part of that feeling of unreachability. Momoko Kimura