2023 · Installation, video, and sound · Liquidity, Zuiunan, Kyoto
Curated by Takayuki Yamada
the third rail began while I was caring for my mother during the COVID-19 pandemic. From her apartment in Yokohama, she watched a freight train haul oil cars from the port into the city each day. After she entered a care home, I returned to her apartment, where the train remained the only active element in an otherwise altered domestic landscape.
Installed in a tatami room, the third rail reconstructs this recurring passage through a working model railway, blackened terrain, archival fragments, moving image, and sound. The work follows the train as a measure of care, absence, and return, linking an intimate family routine to the infrastructures that continue to move fuel, labor, and memory through the city.
The title invokes the electrified rail that powers a train and the “third rail” of public discourse: a charged, difficult subject one approaches at risk — here, the intimate and destabilizing realities of caring for a parent as her life changes.
the third rail
2023
N-gauge model freight train and track, hanging scroll collage of used record covers, oil-spill painting, video on tablet, sound
Liquidity, Zuiunan, Kyoto
Curated by Takayuki Yamada
Dimensions variable
Photographs by Masaki Tada (多田雅輝)
Related: oil spill, paintings that continue the oil thread of the third rail.