折り紙ー暗渠の箱
暗渠、”ankyo” means streets or areas where there used to be waterways in Japanese. There are many of them in Tokyo. Many of these buried rivers became promenades while operating as sewage lines underneath, and other waterways eventually dried out after being covered. In Japanese, “ankyo” simply refers to streets that resulted from putting a lid on the waterways.
Prior to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the government created many “ankyo” by burying the waterways because many of the small creeks and rivers in Tokyo became dirty ditches and smelled badly. The residents complained. The government wanted to hide these bad images and smells from international visitors, so they covered these waterways. Tokyo was also in needs for more land space to create streets and highways for their rapid population growth.
During my residency at Tokyo Wonder Site, I set out to walk as many "ankyo" streets as possible, and recorded my walks with hundreds of photographs, hours of video footage, drawings and notes.
Then I asked my mother to make Origami boxes using the printed images of my photographs. The outside images show “ankyo” streets—where rivers and waterways once existed. As you open the box, images of running water from Ochiai River and Sumida River appear.
