The Swimming Pool
Blue ripples on sun
distort what I once thought
as I swim through air.
In Kanazawa we are inspired to swim but the pool is full of contradictions. You can get in but can’t climb out. You cannot penetrate the surface but can breathe underwater. From the surface this swimming pool looks like any other. But it is not a pool, it is art.
The Swimming Pool is an installation by artist Leandro Erlich at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. What looks like a pool is but a clever thin skin of water through which you can peer down into an ‘under water’ chamber accessed elsewhere.
Inside the chamber the sky ripples above like water. We take a deep breath and look up to a distorted sun and Japanese faces looking down at us. A distorted reality that already feels strangely familiar.
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