A publication documenting fieldwork produced by Buku Akiyama across three locations in Berlin on 17 February, 2025.
While visiting Leipzig in February earlier this year, Akiyama reached out to me to meet in Berlin, where I am, and asked whether there might be any venues here open to hosting his practice in the brief span of one day. In lieu of any access to conventional exhibition facilities, and with one weekend to plan, I sought to arrange spaces available to any resident or visitor in the city through rental and reservation services. After meeting for the first time at Berlin Hauptbahnhof, I brought my companion to the luggage locker area and offered my personal baggage as material. Our next destination was a meeting room within a co-working office, rented for two hours. When the evening came, we travelled to our final destination, a reserved lane at a bowling alley. After completing a few frames, we ended up spending more time with the billiards table, which I was able to reserve in exchange for my Washington driver's license. The selection of sites was meant to model the spaces one occupies during a normal day--morning commute, day-time work, and evening recreational time.
I first encountered Buku Akiyama's work in 2017 as a graduate student in Seattle. It was his hashtag #table_arrangement on Twitter, which is a tag he continues to use that accompanies an image or image series showing improvised arrangements of mostly tableware and disposable materials disused when visiting a public eating place. Whether it was intentional or not I'm unsure, but the use of the tag invited mimicry from many users across a wide range of civil culinary landscapes, myself included. I learned soon after that this tag was only one of many exercises within Akiyama's broader practice of highly improvisational, iterative, and serial activities concerned only with what is available in a given moment. In the same year, a significant amount of his exhibition documentation detailing "15 years of site specific arrangement" was published in Composition No.1–10 and the derivatives, 2001–2016 (Rondade). I contacted Akiyama about acquiring the book, and he graciously mailed me a copy. Eight years later, I've constructed this book in formal dialogue with his, as a way of returning that initial gesture.
- Sean Lockwood, November 2025
Contents: 70 pages of photos, Two unbound photo prints, color + b/w, hardware, and various packaging
Dimension: A4
Edition: 150
Colophon:
Buku Akiyama One day fieldwork, Berlin 17 February, 2025 Publishing: Device Distributing: device.gmbh Archival Printing: Device Offset Printing: Spreedruck, Berlin Ink jet Printing: Nicholas Strobelt Letterpress Printing: Flint Jamison Photography: Sean Lockwood Editing, Designing, Assembly: Sean Lockwood 2025 device.gmbh
€38 + Postage
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