All the Shadows We Have Lost

2017, Single Channel Video, 3 minutes 40 seconds (loop), scored by Joshua Levi Ian

A visual and sonic meditation after author Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's reflections on the Japanese toilet, published in English as In Praise of Shadows.

"Among the reflections that Tanizaki offers on Japanese architecture is his discourse on the toilet, a space he qualifies as 'perfection.' ... Tanizaki's toilet, where the author speculates that countless haiku were born, surrounds the occupant with the textures of nature, enhancing what Tanizaki, following Natsume Soseki, calls a 'physiological delight.' In this discourse, Tanizaki connects architecture with an architectonics of the body: the space of the toilet that surrounds the body serves as a type of skin, an exoskeletal surface that extends the body's limits outward. In the toilet that Tanizaki imagines, the body disappears, is absorbed into the architecture and environment determined by the liminality of the toilet. In the space made possible by the toilet, the human body and nature are fused: indistinguishable and indivisible. Inside and outside and neither within nor without the house, the body vanishes, forming an archive that spans from the innermost interiority of the body to the vast exteriority that surrounds it.  ... In the toilet's intimate space, the place where the body performs its most essential activities, the body is lost. Lost in the exteriority of its most essential activities."

Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)

All the Shadows We Have Lost was a site-specific media installation installed in the Japanese Toilet Manufacturer Toto's showroom in San Francisco from October - December 2017.