Benjamin L. Willard sails, with his four companions, along the Nung River toward Cambodia – a slow journey, unsustainable, which throws the spectator to the claustrophobic anxiety of the wet dark of the jungle; a devastating journey, an LSD hallucination on the contrary, in which all colors are replaced by the lack of them.
It is 1979 and Francis Ford Coppola, with the movie Apocalypse Now, pours into the film the worries of a harassing search, set in a place and time where pure madness is the norm and the unfolding events are altered by the perceptions affected by the fanaticism and mental disorder that destroy the young soldiers.
And so Willard sails, trying desperately to find Colonel Kurt, not only physically, but also and above all, mentally – to grasp its essence, its soul. He will find him at the point where the madness is at its peak, with no face, a black oval that shows only one ear, a jaw, and then complete darkness.
Along the river, before the encounter, the boat that brings the soldiers into the unknown lands in a surreal place, a sort of a little Las Vegas thrown into the Vietnamese jungle. It is an island, bordered by a row of bulbs surrounding a large stage. On one side of this, a huge crowd harbors hundreds of celebrating soldiers, in spasmodic waiting for the helicopter that will take them three Playmates taught to improvise a dance.
Alla Biennale di Architettura di Venezia del 2008, il padiglione giapponese è servito da sfondo ai minuti disegni di Junia Ishigami, che hanno ricoperto totalmente le pareti bianche dell’edificio, dando vita a un mondo poetico di incredibile complessità.
Un estratto di quei disegni si può trovare in un altrettanto minuscolo libro, intitolato Plants & Architectures, stampato da Kano Printing e uscito in concomitanza con l’apertura della Biennale.
Il tema principale, come da titolo, è il rapporto instaurato tra specie vegetali e architettura, un rapporto rivisto sotto una luce nuova, che pone gli elementi verdi allo stesso livello fisico di tutti gli altri elementi -statici, funzionali, materiali- che compongono l’architettura.