APPEARING-DIS-APPEARING:When I was a child I wore traditional Bavarian clothing and enjoyed it very much. I still have traditional Bavarian clothes, but I find myself having less and less occasion to wear them.
Strangely enough, I feel a little bit as though I were in disguise when I wear Bavarian clothing, even though I was born and raised near the Alps. Instead, I mostly wear contemporary western fashion.
Upon arriving in Japan in autumn 2002 for the very first time, I saw Japanese people wearing traditional kimonos and admired them for doing so, But the majority wore clothes like mine - western-style clothing, without any visible link to a specific country of origin.
I had these personal observations in mind when I was developing my project for the Echigo- Tsumari-Triennial.
Tokamachi City’s kimono industry has been suffering from a steep decline for several years already. In my project for Tokamachi City, where traditional fabrics and kimonos have been produced and traded for centuries, the form of the kimono became part of public space in a very visible way.
