Tatsuo Kawaguchi

　Where does the ‘voyage of time’ take us? Or is it to say that time sails the sea? Time does not have to sail on the sea in particular, but it seems to cover the whole world like space on land and sea.
We, human beings who breathe through our lungs, can live on land, but we cannot live in the sea because we cannot breathe through our gills. If there are two worlds, one inhabitable and one uninhabitable, it is tempting to go on adventurous trips from the inhabitable world to the uninhabitable world. The inhabitable world is the world that can be seen by humans, while the uninhabitable world is the world that is unknown and invisible to humans. If this is the case, it seems that the time in the ‘visible world’ and the time in the ‘invisible world’ may not be the same. Isn’t it possible to imagine such a thing? In order to confirm this, we are about to embark on a voyage in a ship floating through time and space in search of the time of the ‘invisible world’.
A hydroelectric power station is a suitable port of departure for this voyage into the unknown. But the hydroelectric power station chosen as the place of departure is already deafening and unable to generate electricity. The hydropower station’s conduits have been hollowed out since the hydropower function ceased. The cavities now look like hollowed-out blood vessels of an earth that has lost its natural power. In the past, clear, pure water flowed like blood, absolutely necessary for the inhabitation of life on Earth. A different kind of sound, different from the water sound that signals the ‘voyage of time’, begins to flow from the hollowed-out conduits that have lost their water sound.
From the cavity on the left, the heartbeat of a baby six months and four days after birth echoes into the cavity as if to announce the continuation of life. From the conduit on the right, the quiet but powerful heartbeat of an infant, two years, one month and ten days old, which has finished walking on all four legs and is now able to walk freely on two legs like a human being, and which is now seeking its own action, rings out as if to announce a future ‘voyage through time’.
In a space that had already come to an end as a power station, a fishing boat that had fished heroically in the rough seas of the Sea of Japan had come ashore with the old fisherman who had manoeuvred it like his own body and the death of his friends, and lay dormant for a long time on the shore. Now it has awoken from its slumber and, just as a dead hydroelectric power station has been reborn as a museum, the fishing boat, having completed its work, has been reborn and is now embarking on the adventure of a ‘voyage through time’, seen off by the heartbeat of the future. The ship is loaded with the only ‘soul’ that can communicate with the ‘invisible world’.
The ship soars into the sky, replacing the constellations in the sky with those on earth, as if the Big Dipper were a compass for the Voyage of Time. The energy needed for the Voyage of Time is a great number of lotus seeds encased in beeswax, as if the ship is about to set sail, seen off by a decade-old rain, a tortoise whose life was turned to stone millions or tens of millions of years ago, and a Pebble Tour, a Palaeolithic tool cast in bronze to bring it closer to modern man. .

(5 Jun 2008)