Mizuho Matsunaga. Sweet Landscape, Angel Parade, 2010

Sweet Landscape

In recent years Mizuho Matsunaga has been engaged with a theme “SHANGRILA(= Paradise)” in which she expressed visually and conceptually a paradise using various artistic mediums. Shangrila is like a mirage for her, and “Sea, Sweets, Snow, and Lace” have been very important motifs in this project. With these issues her three projects are connected together. Matsunaga has been looking for a paradise for many years. Until now she hasn’t found it, but she might have found it in landscapes of Rauma.

In a “Sweet Landscape” exhibition Matsunaga used laced cake papers for the first time and created a big installation to Rauma Lace Week. The installation was inspired by the residence time (16^th June until 10^th August), her interest to lace, archipelago of Rauma, houses of the Old Rauma and the whole Finnish landscape in general.

Matsunaga has been living in Germany for one and half years now. There she found the laced cake papers as her artistic material. Cake papers itself represent sweetness (also sugary) and they adduce sweet things. Cake papers are symmetrical, but in her installation Matsunaga broke it to asymmetrical and compared it to Rococo architecture, which she finds very interesting. In the installation “Sweet Landscape” these element are joined together into the wholeness of Rauma Lace Week.

During her residence Matsunaga felt that Finnish way of thinking and acting is closer to Japanese one than to German. That is why she thought Finns feel the nature and connection to it with their body. She experiences a same kind of a feeling with Rococo architecture or interior and experienced same feeling also during her paddling trips in the archipelago. The small detailed landscape combined to lace is like a Rococo architecture to Matsunaga. In the installation Sweed Landscape Mizuho Matsunaga hoped that people would experience something similar what she did.

Angel Parade

Japanese Mizuho Matsunaga has genarated an idea of an Angels’s Parade. She instructed workshops where fashion label Fly Over was created. Workshops were to culminate to a fashion show and a parade in an Old Rauma during Rauma Lace Week. The idea was: Come and design your own clothes!

Fabric and paper was used for making the clothes that people designed for themselves. Clothes were not done with modeling patterns, but with imaginative experimentation. For decorations people use ribbons and paper cut. There was no age limit, but you needed to have a lot of imagination and were able to use a sewing machine.

Matsunaga taught also some catwalk & posing and took model pictures of the clothes’ makers with their dresses. As her own work she created a dress with a paper cut. The dress was inspired by Sigrid Juselius’ tomb in Pori.

Mizuho Matsunaga descripes the project:

”At the Angel’s Parade the well-known Rauma lace will be carried to the paradise, where it is used to decorate the angel’s clothes. In this fashion-show project a paper-cut technique will be used. The paper-cut silhouettes are a metaphor for the Rauma lace.

Let’s make your own clothes using laces from paper-cut in an atelier of a new fashion label “Fly Over”. You can make any kinds of clothes here. Fly Over’s clothes make your dream reality. You can do anything you want to try and you can be anyone who you want to be.

Then you become a supermodel! Let’s take a photo like in the fashion-magazine and learn the cat-walking! At the last we make a fashion-parade in the Rauma lace Week.

Clothes are symbols of cultural and social identities, but modern fashion is crossing any kind of borders. I hope that, using a fashion, you’ll take off your social roles in the daily life, and will find a new existence hidden in yourself. I invite to this workshop anyone who interested in fashion, and especially kids from every cultural background. Using their traditional clothes and the Rauma lace as a decoration will become a cultural collaboration. And also I expect that this workshop brings some new ideas for the application with Rauma lace.”

Picnic in Heaven

In the workshop, we make our own picnic carpet and then have a picnic together. People cut their original patterns on the carpet. The patterns are their own images about paradise or their hopes for their life. End of the workshop we will have a picnic together. Sharing the meals will bring the people in Rauma together for the multidimensional relationships with their neighbors, the visitors, and the art. People are angels sitting down in their own paradise and become flowers in Rauma like floating see roses on a lake.

Please, bring some food with you, also some sushi availabe.

Supporting Matsunaga's projects

City of Munich, Department of Arts and Culture