善兵衛の目玉(宇宙編)
Zenbei's Eyeballs (Telescope ver.), 2012


This is a new edition of a 2010 work.

For the original work, I asked Riko Shoufukutei,
professional performer of rakugo (a Japanese
traditional sit-down comedy where the lone performer
acts as various characters while remaining seated
on a zabuton cushion), to convert a little-known
old Japanese story, which had been adapted into
animation in 1982, into the rakugo format.

The story is about a guy named Zenbei, whose
eyeballs are freed from their sockets, soaring
through the air in the grasp of crows to see the
view from the sky, and then luckily coming back to
the sockets, yet mistakenly put inside-out, thus
capturing the hidden world inside his body.

In addition to this folktale, this new version involves
another context ― the real, not fictional, Zenbei.
Living in Osaka in the Edo Period, Zenbei Iwahashi
was renowned for his handmade telescopes.

Driven by my assumption that he was the model of
the folktale's protagonist (because using a telescope
and having your eyeballs in the sky must function in
the same way), I asked Riko to re-arrange the rakugo
plot, and I organized his stage at Zenbei Land,
the museum of Iwahashi's telescopes and related
materials in his birthplace: Kaizuka City, Osaka.

This video piece, which documents the performance,
was exhibited in my show at Aichi Prefectural Museum
of Art, Aichi, curated by Kazuho Soeda, from late 2012
to early 2013.

Video stills
Installation views
副田一穂「意識は眼球に宿る、あるいは江戸時代の眼球譚