By projecting footage of the daytoday lives of the homeless—those continually marginalized by Tokyo’s cycle of urbanization and gentrification—at various sites across the city, the activists abruptly revealed Tokyo’s neglected populations to the public eye. Advertisements for the Olympics and a “new Tokyo” are systematically interrupted and replaced by bleak images of individuals struggling in the decaying back alleys and abandoned corners of the city.
NEO
The disturbing intrusion into the new stadium and the busy shopping streets of Ginza is an attempt to provoke feelings of anxiety, anger and repulsion in both citizens and tourists alike. Such a violative and unsettling intervention has the capacity to induce in the spectators’ a feeling of “ego loss,” by which the individual is guided towards a state of liberation, and consequently more aware of the repression perpetrated by Tokyo’s neverending quest for “global city” status and international recognition.
