Fragile Landschaften - Was sich zwischen Körper und Wolken berührt Gabi Schillig & Yui Kawaguchi

As part of the dialog exhibition at the Japanese Cultural Institute in Cologne, Gabi Schillig and Yui Kawaguchi create a transforming space - a fragile landscape of fabrics, words, sound and movement in which memory, transformation and transience can be physically experienced.

Is wearing, wrapping, holding something a bondage or a liberation? Are clothing and fabric protective covers - or membranes that connect us to the world? And does all suffering and joy finally fade away like the dew in the morning?

Inspired by the Japanese Hagoromo legend and Grimm's The Six Swans, the artists explore the hidden power of "wearing" - and bring to light an idea of transience that runs like an invisible thread through German and Japanese myths. Two stories in which a magical garment, a second skin made of fabric, turns the lives of its wearers around.

A breathing architecture is created from soft, fleeting fabrics, light, space and movement - permeable, layered in space, flowing, flowing in time and finally dissolving. The inside becomes the outside, the self becomes the world. The softness of the materials blurs supposed boundaries: Between you and me, nature and man, inside and outside. The exhibition transforms life and language into an experience of freedom.

In this translucent landscape, dance narrative and architectural fragility merge into a poetic network in which fabrics carry words, movements leave behind memories and the space becomes the resonating body of the ephemeral.

Gabi Schillig is a designer and artist. She explores space and architecture as an extension of the body and a medium of communication. Her soft architectures - from textile shells to immaterial membranes - make spatial and physical boundaries permeable and ephemeral. In her artistic research on topologies of softness, she develops experimental dialogical and performative spaces. She is a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Yui Kawaguchi is an award-winning dancer and choreographer. She works with Aki Takase, the Flying Steps and Nico and the Navigators, among others. In 2024, she choreographed and danced Anna II in "The Seven Deadly Sins" at the Berlin Konzerthaus under the direction of Joana Mallwitz. She is also expanding her dance language into 3D animation and developing virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) dance exhibitions.

The term moroyaka in the Japanese title is a word created by Yui Kawaguchi.

- gabischillig.de
- mendora.com

With the kind support of The PhotoBookMuseum

Supported by JTI