MARIKO MORI

THE DREAM TEMPLE

architecture

elevation

If we would look for a symbolic locus inside Mori's cosmos, nothing more than a temple would be the right thought. The Dream Temple shows a new intention of the artist, to guide the visitor through a multimedia installation, based on the natural Becoming . The concept is espressed using the VisionDome system inside a pure and essential white sphere, where the spectator (alone) can step on his knees as for a prayer. The video takes him into a tridimensional trip, as an endless and universal life cycle. The visitor LIVES the BEAUTIFUL EXPERIENCE of an iconographic birth in the water, the research of the light in the dark and the conceptual oblivion lost in an undefined space where the human returns to atom. I guess that this experience is very close to the Nietzsche 's Ab-grund: the choice of a phenomenological sphere without space and chronological dimensions, but the Being. The objective concept is based on the Yumedono Temple (Nara, Japan - 739 a.C), an important sacred traditional architecture, that rapresents a symbol of the buddhist thought. The installation is realized using fiberoptics, plastic, glass, fiberglass: it has an octagonal plan, with stairs on four sides and the access to the VisionDome cell on the main elevation. The project has been designed with the famous Italian studio Cerri and the japanese Yukiharu Takematsu, EPA.

The Temple can't be commented as an architecture, because of its conceptual reason, but we can see through its skin the intention of building a design macro-object to comunicate the dichotomy Being = Becoming. The entire pattern is dominated by the strong and amazing impact of the artist, with her personal high attention to the details. The architectural space is extremely symbolic as a cyber transposition of an ancient typology, revealing in its fiberglass shape all its Morian sacrality. The Temple can be compared to the Etienne Louis Boulle 's project for the Newton's Monument (1784) where the ontological inspiration is given by the analogy between the sphere and the Genius: le Revolutionaire Architecte created an introusive and cyclic composition, where the sacre is expressed by the minimalistic Talking Architecture related to the Illuministic Pragmatism, while, in Mori's art, the sphere is covered by an iconographic surface, as her artificial research suggests. Even in Boulle there is a symbolic garden to access the Temple, and the final point, the centre rapresents the Enlightenment, as ou-topos.

Mariko Mori declared that her intention was to create an utopic and an eutopic dimension, as the ideal place for the historycal Oriental and Western thought, related to the Dream Vision. That's why the Dream Temple is similar to the Boulle and Yumedono types: even if those architecture hadn't the possibilities of creating a virtual space with technologies, both are a NOWHERE place: Boulle and Ledoux projected utopic buildings, based on immagination; while the Buddhist topos is , for Mori, a virtual place too, being a prayer and meditation center. So this is the meaning of the Dream Temple: a passive and unconscious trip in the Becoming for the Human who takes cumscience of his Being: THE ENLIGHTENMENT.

In Italy the Dream Temple was shown @ the Fondazione Prada in 1999, with the art direction of G. Celant. Now the installation is going in all over world with Mori's exhibitions.

If you want to know more about its technical construction and its VisionDome system, go to Elumens Custom VisionDome Designs

If you want to see the Dream Temple exhibition online, go to www.fondazioneprada.org

In my DREAM Picture Gallery you will find the best images I've collected by the web and by the book THE DREAM TEMPLE: here they are some photos of it, its rendering from the Kumano video, a picture of its building phase, roof plan, Mori's sketches and an image of the video

PICTURE GALLERY

the Dream Temple

DREAM-HOME

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