Reclaiming the "Public" in the 21st Year

Since its inception, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa has invited more than two million visitors annually—welcoming an unimaginable multitude of "others" into a museum envisioned as a park, where anyone could come and go freely.

Over the course of two decades, however, the spatial qualities of this institution have slowly begun to settle, solidifying into fixed functions and names. Particularly in public spaces, the possibility of reinterpretation fades, and what remains is used without imagination.

Through the temporary framework of an architecture exhibition, we seek to destabilize this sedimented condition—to gently unsettle the habitual—using architecture as both medium and method. Our aim is not to add something new, but to make visible the latent potentials of the existing, allowing the publicness of the museum to be reactivated through everyday acts of encounter, hesitation, and negotiation.

Here, public space is not a given—it is something that must be continually made and remade by those who pass through it.