SurvivaBall Home Suits (2021)

In the artwork “SurvivaBall Home Suits”, Oyama investigates how it feels to constantly switch between two different sets of homes. For this work, she conducted a series of one-on-one interviews about objects that accompany children and young adults between the ages of 10 and 25 who have or had to move back and forth between two homes following their parents’ separation. The artist explored what toys, everyday objects, and habits constitute important constants and must never be absent in either household to feel at home.
Oyama produced wearable, oversized sculptures of participants’ personal belongings, such as headphones, cuddly toys, or a perfume bottle. For the performance, the objects’ owners moved around on a playing field in their respective costumes, telling and demonstrating their stories like pieces in a game.

The work will be part of the exhibition Look! —Revelations on Art and Fashion, which will take place from September 4, 2021 until January 16, 2022 at the museum Marta Herford, Germany. “SurvivaBall Home Suits” was realized by grant from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Presentation of Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2020.

(Text: Wiebke Hahn, Berlin)

“What makes a place your home? How do you conceptualise this, if home is constantly changing? How do you fill the void of a home you have moved away from?”
In average a person in the United States moves 11.7 times in a life time.[1] Some people move much more frequently and have several homes at a time. People who lead nomadic lives appear to have little attachments to materials and people. Yuka Oyama belongs to this group as someone who herself has multiple simultaneous places of home. From experience, she has discovered that a transitional lifestyle demands stable points and alternative forms of home in order to cope with constantly changing surroundings. What becomes home, and how the notion of home is constructed, is then individual.

From 2012 until 2016 Oyama commuted between Berlin and Oslo. She says of this time

“One day I did an inventory of my suitcase. There were multiple functional digital gadgets like my laptop, smartphone, which allowed me to continue my work and communication. In addition, ATM and credit cards, my passport, keys, lipsticks, a water bottle, glasses, running shoes and toiletries were necessary items. Then I realised that some objects were there to maintain my emotional health. They were a Teddy bear that my son gave me, family pictures, a fountain pen, sketchbooks, a special necklace and a ring given by friends.
The significance of the last group of objects would only make sense to me. Interestingly, these items described much about myself as a person. These items are reminders of very special people as well as tools that allow me to conduct activities that make me feel grounded. In some ways, they helped glue together the patches of multiple homes.”

During her artist residency in Wellington, New Zealand, Oyama sought to portray individual views upon how a handful of portable personal objects help people to make a sense of home. After conducting interviews, she created a portrait of each person as a shelter resembling their objects made out of cardboard boxes. In the next step, she sought to commemorate the experiences of her interviewees in a symbolic way. She orchestrated a filmed performance, where they enacted movements of a hermit crab, a creature who regularly swaps its shell–or home—for a new one in order to grow. As documentation, she scanned the sculptural objects as well as the interviewees’ bodies and made pendants that represented their personal homes.

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[1] “Using 2007 ACS data, it is estimated that a person in the United States can expect to move 11.7 times in their lifetime (…) per single year.” “Calculating Migration Expectancy Using ACS Data,” United States Census Bureau, accessed August 14, 2019, https://www.census.gov/topics/population/migration/guidance/calculating-migration-expectancy.html

Yuka Oyama was originally trained in the field of Contemporary Jewellery Art, and as a result, her art practice stems from the inseparable and intermediary relations between a person and an object. Encapsulation Suits is the core work of her PhD in artistic research, which she conducted at the Art and Craft of Oslo National Academy of the Arts, funded by the Norwegian Artistic Fellowship Programme, from 2012 until 2017. During this time, she investigated how a person and an object can activate each other both physically and psychologically. Specifically, she researched how the active, fluid, and dynamic inner life of objects that we project onto them during daily life can be expressed through worn sculptures that are set in motion.

In The System of Objects, Jean Baudrillard discusses two different types of objects: The first type is a commodity, such as a refrigerator, serving a practical function. The second type is an object that enters into subjective relationships with the owner, and in this sense no longer serves as a commodity. It gains persona and thus people wish to possess it.[1]

In 2013, Oyama asked herself, of everything she owns, what are the five most special objects that she is emotionally attached to? She chose a bag of flour, a bundle of keys, a headdress, a handbag, and a piano. She aimed to find out what kind of inner forces are inherent to these objects that made them appear powerful to her. Then, she constructed life-sized wearable objects so that she could enter into physical dialogues with her emotionally evocative objects through wearing, enacting, and becoming them.

RESEARCH PROCESSES AND METHODS
STAGE 01 FIELDWORK, PUBLIC INTERVENTIONS AND WORKSHOPS
Oyama seeks to investigate the imagined life inherent in objects that we own. She began this research phase by deploying interventions and workshops in the public space and asking random people to draw their “most-special-object” in an imagined anthropomorphized life state. She then translated people’s object stories into small figures made out of textile and clay. By going through this process, she learned that these figures needed to be made in human-size—not cute—in order to express autonomy of the objects.

STAGE 02 CONSTRUCTIONS OF WEARABLE SCULPTURES
She then made a rough draft of four sculptures, a wardrobe, a fire alarm, a drill, and a bag of flour out of polyethylene sheets using black hot glue. Three of them stemmed from someone else’s object stories, while one was the artist’s.

STAGE 03 TWO PERFORMANCES
Next, she examined how to perform the wearable sculptures out on the street and in her studio. In both attempts, she was not convinced that the enactment of sculptures conveyed the agentive quality of the objects. She then decided to focus only on her own object stories. She resumed making the five sculptures: Headdress, Piano, Key, Bag of Flour, and Handbag.

STAGE 04 FIRST CHOREOGRAPHIC EXPERIMENTS WITH A MIME DANCER
Together with a mime dancer, Oyama examined particular characteristics, genders, and possible movements for each sculpture based on mime techniques. Oyama felt that the performances created felt artificial.

STAGE 05 SECOND CHOREOGRAPHIC EXPERIMENTS ON MY OWN
She reiterated the main objective of this research once again, asking herself, “Why are these objects so powerful to me?” She then realised that she needed to enter into even deeper physical dialogues with each object sculpture and she should perform herself. She set up a video camera and examined movements, where she and her sculpture would merge. She filmed five performances that she performed.

OUTCOME
Encapsulation Suits was developed from 2012 to 2017. Oyama says of the process, “it felt like chasing a ghost, something that was compelling and incomprehensible. I often felt stuck, so I took many breaks and worked on other artworks such as Collectors, Cleaning Samurai, Helmet – River, Modern Ballet, and Weavers.” Ironically, these artworks depicted objectification and mechanisation of people, exactly the opposite of her research objective: ‘the life of objects.’ She originally planned to work in collaboration with dancers in order to develop the performance. However, towards 2014/2015, she decided to focus on her own object relations in even more depth. She then worked extensively on creative writing and sketching in watercolour. On her own, she also studied physical constraints given by the weights and forms of the worn sculptural objects. She observed movements where she and her sculpture and would appear as one entity.

The artist discovered that, “it was curious and fascinating to see how some of the sculptures demanded slow movements, whereas others abrupt and rough motions. Gradually, I recognised that it was my personal relationships to specific people, memories and issues that mattered to me in my object-and-I hybrid creatures. Eventually, the emotionally loaded objects that I owned taught me much about who I am as a person, how I want to be as a woman, an artist, and a mother. The whole process almost resembled a self-made psychoanalysis.”

Hans Peter Hahn, a German anthropologist, claims that people remember what has happened in their life by pairing up events with objects, because objects are the co-actors of our everyday life. Furthermore, objects do more than just remind people of something or someone. They also absorb feelings and awareness that we do not consciously recognise. Objects can contain the side effects of past events and a “surplus of perceptions,” which Hahn explains, can evoke the unconscious and give surprising perspectives on personal experiences, making the owners of them look at daily life differently. Therefore, Hahn states that objects may appear to have a life of their own, allowing or restricting people’s intended actions in daily life, and communicating desires and feelings. This makes objects appear as if they were stubborn: they have agency and act on people.[2]

As the result of her research process, Oyama explains that “after going through this enormous journey with my objects, I wanted to reward myself with a medal. I then made a pendant Piano-and-I. I scanned the Piano sculpture and my body, and transformed them in silver, 5 cm in height. In this piece, I finally discovered my approach to jewellery that I had always been searching for: Jewellery that is beyond design and material value. Piano-and-I embodies strong emotional ties to myself and my past, a reminder of who I am, where I am from, and who I want to be. It also symbolises a new beginning of many possibilities ahead and it will accompany me in my future journey.”
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[1] Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London, New York: Verso, 1996), PP. 91 – 92.
[2] Hans-Peter Hahn, ed., Vom Eigensinn der Dinge (Berlin: Neofelis Verlag, 2015), p.11.

Oyama often struggled to balance work and household duties as a female artist and a mother. She wished to spend more time in her studio making artworks than engaging in endless cleaning. In her experience, it simply felt that mothers in general have many more tasks to fulfil than fathers. She personally found that the challenge was how to share the domestic labour and child-rearing tasks exactly fifty-fifty, while maintaining emotional ties between the couple.

Rosemarie Nave-Herz, a German family sociologist, claims that parenting couples who both participate in paid workforce try to have harmonised relationships, but frustrations concerning the delegation of domestic work cause internal conflicts.[1] Our expectations to deliver excellent performances in almost too many areas of everyday life unfortunately tip the work-life-love-balance.

One day while practicing karate with her karate group, Oyama realised some of the most basic movements in karate training are done without even thinking about the motions, because the body knows them. It suddenly cast a new light on how cleaning should be for her: “Don’t think. Become a machine. Get done with it!” Through employing objects found in a person’s house (objects from the inside) Oyama seeks to express sensitive topics hidden in many families, such as fair delegation of domestic work, fixed gender roles, and the prioritisation of functionality over emotionality.
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[1]Rosemarie Nave-Herz, Familie heute 6.Auflage (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2015), pp.142 – 144.

Acts of collecting and hoarding are similar in that they both involve possessing a number of objects. What clearly distinguishes collecting from hoarding is discipline. Hoarding is an endless accumulation without selection, and it shows a lack of care for content, quantity and quality. Collecting, by contrast, demands the updating of knowledge, archiving, consideration of structures/systems, and maintenance of the items’ condition. In some situations, a collection can consist of several sub-series, each of which has an end point. From there, the collector can resume acquiring other items that fit in further series.

The value of a collection is therefore not determined only by the purchase and sale price of the objects, but also by all the activities related to the collection: the time spent searching, acquiring, and maintaining it, not to mention the patience and generosity required to share one’s living space with the objects. A collection may even restrict its owner’s mobility, and oftentimes such a predicament appears awkward and senseless to others. Others find it difficult to understand the fascination of the objects to the collector.

For this project, Oyama conducted extensive individual interviews with collectors of objects during an artist residency at SPACES, in Cleveland, Ohio. She searched for local collectors via the residency’s network, on the internet, by posting announcements on social media, talking to owners of local thrift shops and observing local auctions on eBay. She then met seven people who collect the following: teapots, typewriters, sewing machines, moon-shaped shelves, space age furniture, works of art from northeast Ohio from the period 1910-1920, and carrot products.
The artist then asked each collector the same set of questions:

What are these objects?
How did your interest in these objects begin?
When did this collection start and how long has it been going on?
What is so appealing about these objects?
Which features/aspects/qualities are important?
What are the rules of this collection?

Oyama was especially fascinated by the sites where the collectors stored their objects, in the space of everyday life. Quite often it seemed to be blurred as to whether the house or apartment was there to house the collector, or rather the objects.

“For what you really collect is always yourself.” – Jean Baudrillard

“On the first day in my elementary school in Japan, my teacher handed me a bucket and a piece of rag and told me that I should go get some water and wipe the floor. Other children fetched water, went on their knees and wiped the floors, as if it was an absolutely normal thing to do. It was a foreign ritual that seemed utterly strange, almost unreal. I sought to communicate the feeling of observing a ritual conducted by a group of people from the standpoint of a foreigner.”
-Yuka Oyama

Oyama’s grandmother taught her how to use a sewing machine by sewing a particular cross pattern on rags. Oyama recalls of this memory, “This was the first complicated machine I learned to use as a child. Today, as an adult while using machines like this one, I began to feel that everyone was turning into mechanical humans.”

In the project Modern Ballet Duo & Trio, Oyama uses ‘Duo’ as a metaphor for a couple or partnership, and ‘Trio’ for a family or team of three. As in her artwork Helmet-River, which used a large group of nine, actors become like robotic soldiers in their activities. Red, used in Modern Ballet Duo, is the colour of the thread that is traditionally used to sew rags to wipe floors in Japan. It is also believed that couples who are destined to meet and marry are connected with a piece of invisible red thread tied around their little fingers.

A home is a home is a home started from conducting interviews with thirty people in the city of Kolding in Denmark, who lead nomadic or uprooted lives; for example, a lorry driver, a pilot, refugees, IT workers, expats, seasonal migrants and soldiers. This piece investigates how emotional values expressed in a handful of portable objects remind the owners of who they are, and consequently give them a sense of security that may become an alternative form of home. As a result of the findings, the students designed three sculptures and accessories that interpreted the narratives of the individuals.
In the final installation, three illuminated sculptures descended to tell personal transient biographies of three interviewees and how some objects help fill the void of missing homes.

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek/Irish journalist (b.1850 in Greece, d. 1904 in Japan) collected and translated traditional Japanese folktales and Buddhist tales that were considered old-fashioned and unattractive for many Japanese scholars at the end of the 19th century. (Published in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Japanese Ghost Stories, Kwaidan). In these tales, domestic objects were anthropomorphised and conveyed morality tales rooted in the culture of the past

Hearn was especially interested in themes like the duality of dead spirits and real life. Through translating the folklore and religious tales, placing them in a modern context and language, Hearn succeeded in transforming the stories more accessible—like lived experiences. His creative input provided profound details and images that allowed English readers to better grasp a sense of Japanese culture. Eventually, Hearn rescued a number of Japanese folktales that might have otherwise vanished. His intervention was so important, that in fact Japanese people retold and rewrote Hearn’s stories, translating them back from English into Japanese.[1]

Oyama was fascinated by the choice of objects in Hearn’s tales. For example, soldiers made of toothpicks appear and dance at night. As a result, a woman suffers from a lack of sleep. It turns out that these toothpicks are trying to tell her to stop stubbing used toothpicks into a tatami mattress. In another story, voices of two children come out from a used futon duvet. The duvet had once been used by two orphans as a shelter, protecting them from the cold after they had lost their home. They were found dead in the morning, and the duvet was sold on afterwards. The story condemns the greed of the people selling the duvet for profit.

In Heroes, Helpers, Enemies… at Work, Oyama sought to find out what kind of domestic objects we would select today and what kind of advice for living in our time that they could give us. To do this, she interviewed people of various backgrounds and vocations, asking them to select objects found at places where they work, that for them, displayed various human characteristics. She also asked them to make humanized versions of these objects in drawings. From these drawings, she constructed sculptures. She worked on this artwork during an artist residency at IASPIS, where she had her studio at the Ädellab at Kostfack in Stockholm in 2009. The school shared a cafeteria with Nokia, which allowed Oyama to meet engineers, software developers, taxi drivers, art students, faculty members and administrational staff and discuss the objects that they need at work.
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[1]Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, translated by Masayuki Ikeda (Tokyo: Kadokawa Bunko Sofia, 2006), pp. 346-347.

Oyama says of this project, that “the performance of Encapsulation Suits made me aware of many past and current personal issues and matters in my life that I had paid little attention to. After the self-learning process, I became even more curious to find out what else these objects knew about me. I then came across the concept of psychodrama.”

WHAT IS PSYCHODRAMA?

Psychodrama is also known as family constellation. It is a form of psychotherapy in which a group of unknown, non-professional actors called ‘protagonists’ engages in an improvised acting-out of specific situations. A ‘director’ facilitates the session. Someone else acts the role of a ‘client’ who is called the ‘stand-in.’ Each player receives her/his role and develops a role-play based on the story that the ‘client’ proposes about her/his concerns. The striking element of this approach lies in the enabling of the client to see her/his life objectively through being re-enacted by other people.

For this project, Oyama worked with Malwina Durkalec, a professional psychodrama leader, who understood the artist’s intentions and was open enough to agree to conduct a psychodrama with her sculptures. They filmed the piece without a rehearsal. Oyama used the film solely for documentary purposes. Everything was improvised, and the artist had no control over the consequences.