"Viaggio in Italia" is the title of the exhibition accompanied by a critical text by Ilaria Bernardi: it starts from the interiors of some historic theatres (including Bologna, Sabbioneta, Mantua); then it retraces part of the Italian stages of a famous journey done in the sixteenth century by four Japanese delegates, also known as the “Four Boys” or “Tenshō ken’ō shisetsu (The Tenshō Embassy to Europe)”; before ending in the boundless spaces of the Amalfi sea.In the summer of 2015, the artist was in Italy to carry out his project on theatres.
Visiting the oldest surviving opera house in Europe, the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza designed by Andrea Palladio, he comes across the Quattro Ragazzi for the first time.
This is how Sugimoto talks about the genesis of the project:
“(…) Pointing to one of the fresco panels (the foyer has a beautiful fresco that runs along the walls just under the ceiling), the director of the theatre explained to me that it showed a group of envoys from Japan welcomed into the theatre when they visited Vicenza while passing through Rome in 1585, the year the theatre opened. After careful observation I could distinguish, with almost absolute certainty, four Japanese-looking people in the front row. They were the famous young envoys, the four boys, of the Tenshō mission in Europe. Immediately a strong interest arose in me in tracing the travels of the four boys around Italy. I began to investigate their movements and discovered that after landing in Livorno they went to Pisa and Florence, via Siena to Rome, and then from Assisi to Venice. I had photographed the Pantheon in Rome, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Cathedral of Siena, all buildings that were already there when the four boys arrived in Italy. Almost by chance, I realised that I was seeing the same buildings that the four boys had seen. Voices from a distant time reached out to me: ‘we want to see through your eyes the same places we once saw in Europe’, they said. The voices could have come from the realm of the dead rather than from some corner of my mind, they mixed, they resonated, they made themselves heard only by me like an echo. Having until then only followed the footsteps of the four boys by chance, I consciously decided to visit and photograph other places they had visited. Chance had turned into necessity. I had no idea how faithfully I could recreate 400 years later the way things looked back then. (…) I visited the places of the origin of my spirit and I took a journey in order to have visual confirmation, which I reveal here in this exhibition."
