We are very happy to host Mako Ishizuka in these special conditions, the quarantine residency. Mako´s work seems to be a perfect match for the circumstances.
In her practice, she attempts to intervene into the psychological and physical distances that emerge where the global meets the everyday, using her experiences and imagination as springboard. It manifests itself in various forms, such as installations, solitary acts, social projects, and writings.
Since 2018, Mako is engaged in “After-Ripening & Corruption”, a project around the language and cultural translations in the lives of people moving, originating from her experience of being not at ease with mother tongue and acquiring a particular accent in the way to view the world after having lived in various societies. In the project, she scoops up the shades in the movements such as emotions, deviations, and assumed errors in a playful manner, using workshop as main form.
It travels to different platforms and evolves, picking up things from the past location to grow further in the new context: games of language chain activating the multilingual abilities of the residents in Södertälje; experiments to paraphrase social manners and translate between the most geo-politically distant people in Vienna; social exercises of verbal acts and movements traversing the wall in Johannesburg; and a research on the relation between mother tongue and worldview in the society divided by language in Riga.
Mako Ishizuka studied interdisciplinary studies (culture/philosophy/sociology) in Japan and free arts at Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Malmö Art Academy. Her practice has been presented at Fittja Pavilion at Architecture Biennial in Venice, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, EHESS in Paris, etc. Her ongoing project “After-Ripening & Corruption” has been hosted at Södertälje Konsthall in Sweden, Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, and ISSP and International Literature Festival in Riga.