Kuroda - Sponges

In space, black holes absorb light, they are compact. Celestial objects that prevent any form of matter or radiation from escaping.
Aki Kuroda, White Sponge, Performance show - Ecole Alsacienne à Paris - 2006
For Aki Kuroda, the sponge is also the representation of a world with undefined shapes and contours. A mass which absorbs while being a passage towards another galaxy.
Aki Kuroda - Sponge

"Aki Kuroda's painting becomes an interstellar journey. From the Earth, there remain only the pieces of an incompatible past that spin in space and sow the canvases, the stars. The genesis of the work is no longer confused with that of the Earth but with that of the universe as a dream, labyrinth, sponge, island and garden. This revolution is analogous to the one that removed the Earth from the center of our cosmos. This time, there is no more Earth and the mythology that takes place has the appearance of a prophecy that no one had yet dared to pronounce.

Have we asked ourselves who will be the man the day we leave the Earth? It is not only a question of leaving it in the sense of leaving the body and dying. It is a question of (dis-)continuing the race and going to live "elsewhere". And the figure is the possible body of this elsewhere that no longer has coordinates. The displaced, spaced figures do not know how to inhabit anything anymore. They are themselves the place where everything passes and changes and dies of bodies, places, tropes and meaning. The referents of all the stories we have told ourselves here below, the Earth and the heavy and "grave" body (or the grave body as a tomb body) seem to be abolished. This barely imaginable future transforms the past as past time on Earth into a myth just as incredible as the future: time mixes. "

Camille Fallen
Black Sponge, original engraving.