I discovered tomasons when I read the book portrait with keys by Ivan Vladislavic. Everybody who lives in Johannesburg, or has lived here, should read this book.
"Johannesburg is a frontier city, a place with contested boundaries. Territories must be secured and defended or it will be lost. Today the contest is fierce and so the defences multiply. Walls replace fences, high walls replace low ones, even the the highest walls acquire electrified wire and spikes.
The tomason of access is our speciality. There are vanished gateways everywhere"(Vladislavic 2006, 185).
The term "tomason" originates from an art and architecture collective formed in 1986, called Rojo Kamatsu or translated, "roadside observation". It was recognised as part of the New Dada Movement and founded by Akasegawa Genpei.
Tomasons are the flashings and detritus of the incessant churn of buildings; of the destruction and redevelopment that characterizes all cities. Cities are no longer clean slates.
Tomasons are the useless, abandoned leftovers of the city. Stairs to nowhere, bricked-up windows and doorways, empty poles.
Genpei regards tomasons as elements attached to real estate, preserved in a way as to become useless objects. He views such objects as entirely passive, "eye-of-the-beholder" art; or meta-art. It is art created by the city, unintentionally.
I see tomasons as ultra-art: it observes the urban landscape and calls attention to to extraordinary aspects of ordinary objects. It creates disturbances between perspectives and reality.
I discovered tomasons when I read your blog. Very interesting. Unfortunately now I cannot walk or drive anywhere without being on the lookout for examples in my neck of the woods - the French speaking part of Switzerland. I thought I would see many, because labour, demolition and dumping are very expensive here. On the other hand the Swiss are super organised and tidy so the best areas to search will probably be more in the countryside than the cities.
ReplyDeleteYour blog did get me thinking about our own "tomasons" called the toblerones. The Toblerone Line was constructed in the 1930s as a line of defence against invasion. These anti-tank structures look a lot like the shape of the famous Toblerone chocolate bar - from there the name.
I find it ironic that they were built after WWI, but fortunately they were in place by the outbreak of WWII. Whether they really helped to ward off invasion or not, one would not know. It is just weird that man thinks he can build walls or barriers to keep himself safe from danger (just as the suburban walls of Johannesburg were the first lines of defence). More and more lines had to be drawn - burglar bars, alarm systems, laser beams, security guards, gated communities.
In the end life in a city or a country keeps on moving - contracting and expanding - according to the surrounding energies. Tomasons are a reminder of that.
I suppose tomasons are created due to different factors in different cities. Johannesburg might have a lot of tomasons of access mainly due to security reasons. In Venice there are also many tomasons of access, but due to a totally different reason. Many doors and windows are closed off. The rising water level creates flooding of the first floors of buildings, leaving many doors and windows useless. I wonder where this might end. Tomasons will always be part of our cities - a normal evolution of progress.
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