ART LIVES TORIDE Where Art Is Born

Izumi Sakai:
I mainly work with the human mind. I sometimes call it healing art. My family has always had a lot of hospital care. When I was about 4 years old, my father broke his neck and was in a life-and-death situation. So I went to the hospital room every day. I was not allowed to visit him, so I only went because I felt like it.

At that time, an old man in the next hospital room saw a flip book I had made and he said and praised me, “It’s so interesting! You are a genius! It was an unforgettable experience even as a child. Hospitals were the first place where people saw my work before it was exhibited in museums.

My mother was mentally unstable, and welfare and care were a normal part of my home. It was something I saw every day, so it would be unnatural not to be involved in my output.

When I was a child, I started by drawing on the back of flyers with a ballpoint pen, and when I realized it, it became something I wanted to do. I decided to do it no matter whether people around me were against it or not, and entered the Tokyo University of the Arts.

What I create has changed little by little. When I was in high school, I painted Japanese-style paintings that I thought would be good for decorating hospitals. But in my first year of college, I met a person who has amblyopia.. To that person, my Japanese paintings were nothing more than blurry, rough paper.

I felt helpless and wondered what I was doing. Since then, I have been trying to create something that is not a painting, but something that uses all five senses, something that can be used in any way that people can relate to.

“Goat Online Consultation Service Production Department” is a project that was conceived by me and is working with the help of others. The reason I started it was because I myself was very mentally ill in the spring of the Covid pandemic in 2020.. I made a lot of calls to various mental health counseling centers.

But all of them were disconnected. Anyway, there are not enough contact points. I wondered what it would be like to have people who were really in need of money and people who were in shock because their boyfriends had dumped them all gathered at the same counseling center.

The works I am making can never be salvation. They can’t save you, but I hope they can comfort you. Goats are the same way. They will never give me money or tell me the right solution, but I feel that they listen to me.

They never give me advice I don’t need. They just say nothing and “eat” the leaves without reading them. Personally, I like that. I started the website in the hope that it would become a consultation service for people who just want to get their thoughts out somewhere, and that it would help people who are under pressure to get the right information.

I asked Sakamoto, who is also a student of the Department of Intermedia Art, to create a website for me.

Yasutaka Sakamoto:
I myself had a tough time of the pandemic that kept me from going outside, and it was quite painful. I was also creating websites and games, so at that time I was thinking about whether I could do something like game therapy. When Sakai-san contacted me, I felt a sense of relief that everyone was thinking about the same thing.

At first I thought it was just going to be one project, but Sakai-san said she would be responsible for it for 10 years. There are other part-time jobs that involve creating websites, but having a site that continues in that way allows us to remember what we have been up to lately. It is a time when we don’t get together very often, so I hope it will become a place that is like our own family home.

Sakai:
We would like to keep this going as long as there are goats at Geidai. We will take the problems and complaints that you write on the website and we will write them on the goats’ favorite tarajo leaves for them”. When we give it to the goats, we will send it live and they will see it and say, “Your problem, now eaten”.

We are still in the beginning stages of actual operation, so there are many things we don’t know, but as we continue, for example, if we receive many comments such as “There are many abandoned cats and we feel sorry for them,” we will consult with organizations that can respond to such requests. We are hoping that this will lead to the next movement, rather than just collecting messages.