artspleen: SIMON FUJIWARA ~ EMPATHY I ~ ESTHER SCHIPPER ~ until September 30, 2018

Simon Fujiwara Empathy I, 2018 5D simulator installation (with video, sound, motion, water, and wind) Duration 3:49 min Outer dimensions of box: 3,71 x 7,6 x 5,35 meters. Edition of 3.
Courtesy: the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin
Photo: © Andrea Rossetti

SIMON FUJIWARA
EMPATHY I
ESTHER SCHIPPER
until September 30, 2018

How many times have I found myself sitting at the table in a Café, imagining the life of the person
sitting next to me.

So many other times I ignored how people I care could feel when I was hurting them!

But thinking further on: Can we actually feel how someone else is feeling when is deported and
starved on a boat in the middle of the sea? Is cruelty linked to control the last form of pleasure?

Well, in both cases, what we are talking about is called EMPATHY! This means to get under someone
else's skin.

The first solo show at Esther Schipper, by the londoner Simon Fujiwara, naturalized Berliner, is
evolving around this topic.

In the exhibition space is reproduced a waiting hallway, with chairs put in square around a table, a
ticket dispenser for a take-a-number system, the the red numbers to show when is your turn, a water
distributor and even a wifi free connection spot. On the table are several copies of the book “50
shades of gray” by E. L. James. The shallow but best seller novel about a refined as much as boring
pseudo-sadomasochistic love story.

The waiting room is not just a waiting-for-waiting situation. Even though that would have been cool
enough. But it’s the access before the ‘real’ artwork: an experience-simulation video in a dark room
created in the gallery.

Only two people at times get into the room.I went in together with a nice stranger and sympathetic
curator.

We were in for about 10 minutes. A guide told us to sit in the chairs and fest our belt. Then the show
begun: a scrumbeled and exciting collection of several experiences simulations, the kind you can find
in some theme-parks.

We were forced into the POV of someone else. I smashed into a window for start, flew against the
wind, splashed into the water… so much fun!

Fujiwara built a genuine artificial experience of feeling through the other under the supervision of the
Big Brother ( who? Fujiwara himself ?). I felt a little bit like in one of those sci-fi fiction where my
conscience was embodied in a robot. A little bit like in Westworld. But at the same time, it seemed to
me a sort of fetish-feeling, as the copies of the books in the waiting room and the waiting room itself.
We shared something together though...and I thought it was real!

The simulator room is a disavowal. This mechanism is contesting the right of a thing to be what it is.
What Freud describes as a fetish is the frozen image through which a men deny the absence of a
penis in a woman. “This is the last moment in which one could still believe” using Deleuze words. If
we could steal from Deleuze once more we could call it a ‘neutralization for protection’ that idealize,
suspending the reality to protect us from the consequences that knowing it would carry.

As in the experience proposed by Fujiwara, we are forced into an all-costs-amusement of which we
have lost the real pleasure. More than slaves, it seems to me, we are prisoners of it. However it is
unclear of whom we are prisoners.