岡留優

Yu Okadome

In his work Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes masterfully captures the original essence of photography with the phrase “it once was.” This is because photography, unlike painting or text, was a medium capable of proving that something “once truly existed there.” However, in the modern era, photography has transformed into something that can be ‘processed’ or “generated,” and its power to prove “it once was” is rapidly fading.

This is a commonplace and rather unimportant point. The exhibition “New Default” takes Barthes' words, mysteriously expands and reinterprets them, and focuses on proving identity—for example, insisting that something originally a desk, now dismantled and reassembled as a chair, must be used as a desk rather than a chair, despite the absurdity of such a position. —for example, dismantling something that was originally a desk and reassembling it into a chair, then insisting, “No, since this was originally a desk, it must be used as a desk, not a chair,” and so on, presenting such unreasonable arguments before ultimately failing. This is the kind of parody performance and installation exhibition we will be holding.