“Now that I’m drawing a map, please tell me about somewhere that  has lingered in your memory.” Should Miya Kaneko ask you that  question, what kind of place would you recall? City and Memory— these are the themes that Kaneko has been engaging with. 

Whenever we hear that word “city,” we imagine a densely  populated area. And yet, Kaneko’s concept of a “city” does not  necessarily mean it is densely populated; it might just, for example,  consist of a single dwelling. And, what if there’s a supermarket in  the vicinity? Well, if there’s just one person, then there will be a  natural concentration of goods and information. Their genesis and  development are seen as the makings of a “city.” 

This sense of “city” has been articulated in Translate the Silence  of the Map (2017). Kaneko opened up her Koganecho studio in  Yokohama to friends and acquaintances, as well as to occasional  unexpected strangers who dropped by to visit. Using a map as a  starting point, she asked them to tell their own stories and engraved  the names of those places they mentioned on aluminum. Where,  however, have these place names been replaced on the map? Have  they relocated from the visitor’s memory to Kaneko’s memory, or  did they simply move off the map and onto aluminum? Perhaps  both. Place names rearranged by randomness, not by measured  distances, are a map, and yet not a map. The place names are  disentangled from their exact locations and become traces—like  particles— akin to an accumulation of “points” between the visitor’s  memory and Kaneko’s memory.  

This perspective, which sees the situation in which people pass  things and information back and forth as a microcosm of the “city,”  becomes apparent in Please Imagine an Invisible Map (2018). The wall  of a conference room in a securities firm is a basis for a map on which  visitors are invited to imagine an “invisible map.” The five key subjects  are: “a central location;” “a key location;” “somewhere you want to go;”  “places you have been;” and “places you remember.” Mr. A writes the  name of a location in Tokyo: “Ginza is here,” followed by Ms. B, who  writes another place name, remarking “If Ginza is there, then it must  be somewhere around here.” Whereupon Mr. C says, “My Ginza is  over here on the edge,” and writes the same place name but in another  location. Some people superimpose their maps upon those of others,  whilst others don’t. Others again draw places not to be found on  Earth, while some draw in imaginary places that don’t even exist.  Kaneko then accordingly interconnects all these place names, or  points with “lines.” 

Interlinked like a traffic network, the place names appear to  regain their structure as a map, and yet they also resemble a star  chart, a tangle of constellations surging from memory. So, perhaps  it was natural for Kaneko to juxtapose the “invisible map” with an  “asteroid.” In Drawing of an Asteroid (2019), lines akin a traffic  network on a map are continuously moved across for a given  duration, evoking an “asteroid,” which is not the earth, i.e. evoking  a space that has not been mapped and not inhabited. This is nothing  

other than a vision —a new foundation—to replace the “place” in  which the “invisible map” has been drawn. The interrelationship  between these lines explores a system of “surface” variations, akin to  the facets on a cut diamond. 

Kaneko held an open studio for Undiscovered Asteroids  Observatory (2020). The small space isolated from the rest of the  exhibition was meant to ensure a safe distance from the public in  order to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. It was designed  in such a way that only the back of the temporary wall could be seen  from inside the exhibition space, while Kaneko’s drawings could be  seen through the glass facing the street. Visitors could speak with  Kaneko by telephone. Kaneko would begin by asking: “Now that I’m  drawing a map, please tell me about somewhere that has lingered in  your memory.” “There was a candy shop. It’s a house. The storefront  was made of concrete and there was a bench. I used to hang around  there and play with my friends. …” Kaneko traced the visitors’  recollections—not the external shapes of buildings—and drew them  on the map, combining them as though they were the living  environment of people on another planet. During the same time  period, Undiscovered Asteroids: An Invitation to Earth from a Few Light  Years Away (2020), was installed on the walls of Motomachi Chukagai Station on the Minatomirai Line in Yokohama; somewhere  between a “surface” and a “solid,” this collage in which the “real”  maps were cut in order to correspond with the traffic network and  pasted in as an asteroidal facet. That is why, at the end of the process,  in Undiscovered Asteroids Observatory, the faceted surface of the  “non-existent” map, drawn by hand through memory, represents the  surface of an “asteroid” and is expressed as a “three-dimensional”  mass—though it lacks a reverse side. The very fact that it is  represented as a mass strikes one as a highly significant change. 

“…There was a stationery shop in front of the candy shop.” I  wonder why they remembered that. With memories, a point  becomes a line, a line becomes a surface, a surface becomes a solid.  “My friend’s house was at the end of the street …,” The cityscape  gets a bird’s-eye view. Kaneko’s memory eventually serves as a hub  for visitors’ memories, which are “observed” as a collective, that is,  as a “city. 

This essay on the “city” and “memory” is primarily a way of  geographically interconnecting and tracing the “places” that Kaneko  has created, evolving from “points” to a “line,” from “lines” to a  “surface,” and from “surfaces” to a “solid.” Invariably, there’s another  dimension to that “place” where “memories” and “memories”  overlap. Memories, albeit limited by time and space, are nonetheless  disentangled from them and reconnected to them, thus forming  fresh time-space networks.  

翻訳:ジョン・バレット 

Translated by John Barrett 

翻訳校正:山田よしえ 

Revised by Yoshie Yamada