- 2023-2025
- Tokyo
- Roppongi
Exhibition design for the special exhibition “pooploop” at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, a design museum in Roppongi, Tokyo. Over the course of roughly a year and a half, we participated as part of the curatorial team, shaping the content of the exhibition.
Rubbish disappears once discarded, and faeces vanish when flushed away. We decided to name these overlooked, dismissed, or wilfully ignored elements of our world as the missing links born of indifference and blind spots.
When attention is turned to these neglected aspects, previously unnoticed connections emerge: chains of cause and effect, cycles of exchange, and flows of circulation. Everything is in flux, all things are impermanent—everything is always in transit, moving from one place to another across different scales of time and space.
At the end of the exhibition, the gathered works will be carefully packed and returned to the artists. It evokes the image of disparate objects brought together into a single space for a limited time, only to be scattered once more.
What if this image extended beyond the exhibited works to encompass the display fixtures, walls, and the entire exhibition space? We envisioned the exhibition itself as existing in a liminal state—one poised between gathering and dispersal, construction and deconstruction, catch and release.
To realise this, we constructed most of the exhibition’s walls and furniture using rental materials.
It is common practice in exhibitions to use wooden rental panels for building walls. These panels are designed for reuse, circulating within the industry from one exhibition to another. We used these rental panels as they were—stacking them to form partitions or repurposing them as furniture.
To mitigate their otherwise heavy and imposing presence, we inserted wooden battens between the panels, creating gaps that enhanced both visibility and ventilation. The panels’ surfaces, bearing the vivid traces of past exhibitions—handwritten notes, scratches, wallpaper remnants—layered like geological strata, imbued the space with a rich, textured atmosphere.
To compensate for the shortage of existing panels, we steadily produced new ones of the same specifications. After the exhibition, these new panels will be added back into the supply chain, while an equivalent number of older, worn-out panels will be retired. While valuing the longevity of objects is essential, creating new ones is not inherently negative. Through this exhibition, we explored a system that fosters this kind of metabolism.
Plinths made from stacked wooden crates, benches created by placing soft cushions wrapped in protective fabric on top of pallets, and daybeds formed by aligning rows of existing stools. A number of setups were created by playfully combining items that had been lying around the construction site, as if encountering them for the first time. Once the exhibition ends, these objects, along with the rental panels, will quietly return to their initial locations, unchanged and unassuming.
Somewhere, in another exhibition, on another wall or surface, a panel scrawled with the words “pooploop” might appear again.
Just thinking about that gets us a little excited.
Exhibition Directors: Taku Satoh, Shinichi Takemura
Art Director: Tomohiro Okazaki
Planning Associate: Yuma Kano, Ayaka Shimizu, Mai Tsunoo, Shuta Hasunuma, Amachi Yoshimoto
Scenography: DOMINO ARCHITECTS
Infographic Design: Akino Tagami
Installation: Higure 17-15 cas
Photography: Masaki Ogawa
21_21 DESIGN SIGHT Directors: Taku Satoh, Naoto Fukasawa
Associate Director: Noriko Kawakami
Program Manager: Takako Nakahora
Program Officer: Moeto Yasuda
Participating Creators: Koro Ihara, veig, Tomohiro Okazaki, Hiraku Ogura, Alternative Machine, Yuma Kano, Kitasenju Design, Zach Lieberman, Taku Satoh, Ayaka Shimizu, STUDIO SWINE, Shunsuke Takawo, Shinichi Takemura, TatsuyaM, Mai Tsunoo, Dave Whyte, Akiko Nakayama, Shuta Hasunuma, Mike Kelley, Toshio Matsui, Hideyuki Yamano, Katsunobu Yoshida, Amachi Yoshimoto, and other
– Our world is in constant circulation. Things change form and move continually, influencing each other in complex and diverse ways. In the wildness of nature, almost nothing endures in one state. There is neither waste nor excrement. Yet both have become serious problems in today’s society. Culturally, waste and excrement are marginalized. They are regarded as things to be ignored. The garbage tip and flush toilet have become black boxes, or devices that actively encourage us to ignore them. Yet despite all this, in reality, nothing vanishes completely or instantly.
This exhibition looks at our environment. It ranges from close surroundings, to outer space, focusing on all manner of “waste and excrement.” We define the world’s various circulations as a “pooploop.” By forcing a confrontation with things we habitually avoid, we have discovered the pooploop’s huge range and dimension, and not only as a social issue. We encountered wonders and curiosities as soon as we decided not to regard waste and excrement as objects to be immediately burned or flushed. This exhibition offers careful observations so as to understand without simplifying. Rethinking pooploop is a trigger to redefining possibilities in artifact design. The exhibition is thus a place for experimentation and assessment of the notion of a world in circulation. Circulation is constant. It never stops. If you find a piece of something missing somewhere, it will mean a new loop has surely begun.- *Excerpts from the event outline
