Koshirakura Landscape Workshop/The City After-Image, Koshirakura Village

Two consecutive workshops will bring together contrasting visions of the present cultural and economic climate of Japan seen from two extreme sites, one rural and one urban, located 200km apart. Participants are encouraged to apply for both workshops in order to document a set of landscapes: a micro-social fabric and architecture of urban erasure.

Landscape Workshop, Koshirakura Village, Niigata

Launched in 1996, the Koshirakura Landscape Workshop has evolved into an annual local event. Its overall agenda is to explore a form of social and cultural sustainability within the post-agricultural community of Koshirakura. A new phase of the programme will set out a long-term strategy for an intercultural revitalisation tailored to the community, with a series of building experiments with locally available materials such as timber, earth, stone and bamboo, documentary making and informal events all running in tandem with Koshirakura’s annual local festivals.

The City After-Image (AA Maeda Workshop) F-2 Site, Tokyo

The F-2 project – an ongoing urban redevelopment scheme in Fujimi 2-Chome 10 Ban Area in central Tokyo – is probably the last example of urban transformation on this kind of scale in Japan. This workshop is planned as a series to coincide with key stages of demolition and construction and will take place over the next five years. Utilising spaces within the project site, the workshop will explore and test alternative strategies for the creative use of urban spaces caught somewhere between scrap and buildings, while capturing a series of moments through which hidden layers, interiority and sections reveal their narratives, documenting the surrounding city as a catalogue of beautifully incomplete objects.