Forst
Masayuki Akiyoshi
2010
öffentlich zugänglich
Moosacher St.-Martins-Platz, 80992 München
Wandgestaltung mit 76.160 Einzelfotos
76,160 individual photos, digital prints on aluminum plates
North wall: 5 m x 117 m; south wall: 5 m x 135 m
Architecture: P. Kramer und J. Wiedemann, Baureferat
Photos: Florian Holzherr
Text: Roberta De Righi
Sometimes you have to go down into the underground in order to understand the world in all of its diversity. Take the Moosacher-St. Martins Platz subway station: its walls feature a photo-mosaic that assembles a wealth of impressions into a detailed, overall view of the district. Masayuki Akiyoshi used 76,160 fragments from the surface world to create a digital installation for the station consisting of two parts, one five meters high and 117 meters long; the other five meters by 135 meters. He calls it Forest, not least because he grew a “forest of pictures” below ground. And just as moss is both the primordial basis and the breeding ground for a forest, the green from Moosach’s gardens shines through in many places, as if it were the ground for the photo-painting.
Akiyoshi’s 11-x-15-cm photographs are what he calls “bits of roots from the above-ground world.” You discover red gumball machines and blue garbage bins, yellow signs and green garage doors, along with countless flowers, the two churches of St. Martin[AM1] , and the richly ornamented gables of old buildings. While those looking out of the subway train window can recognize individual motifs close-up, people waiting on the platform mainly perceive the work as a whole. Akiyoshi’s theme is the depiction of spaces, sometimes with “traces of life,” at other times without. In his art he brings the three-dimensional to the flat surface, as he does in Forest, which also forms a unit in terms of time and place, as it depicts Moosach throughout the changing seasons. For a year, the artist walked the streets once a week with his camera. The arrangement of the pictures corresponds to the order in which they were shot. Hence, the changes from summer and fall to winter and spring can be followed in a clockwise direction, while the artist’s path can almost be traced in the vertical direction. In this way the time spent waiting for the next train expands into a journey through time—and makes you want to take a real tour of the city.