The Toolbox book

A multilingual compilation of basic items, tools, equipment and materials necessary for every creator has been published in April 2013 - a great tool!

Knowledge of tools and materials is essential for artists. Approaching the image in your mind by making an actual, tangible object using materials and tools, is an important stage of work for every creator. Just as with skill, these tools are essential to improving the efficiency of your work, fixing pertinent issues, making the impossible possible, and solving dramatic problems.

For people who work in Europe, it is really challenging how, with opening night closing in on us, we end up wasting so much time trying to explain what we need just because we can’t remember the name of a certain necessary item. And then, even in our native language Japanese, it happens regularly that we don’t know what something is called. We already know that by communicating in gestures, our ability to describe our intentions without using any words improves – but we never manage to remember the word in question, and end up repeating the same process over and over again.

Taking this kind of experience as a basis, we gathered the names of things that seemed necessary, and made them into a book. We hope this book will be a companion for artists doing residencies, for both Japanese artists producing work in foreign countries, and foreign artists working in Japan, to assist you in communicating about your work in an unfamiliar place. This first book is a general compilation of the tools, equipment and materials we thought might be necessary for your work. May it be helpful to you in all of your foreign endeavors.

• TOOLBOX 01/ Basics published on 5 April 2013 (64 pages, in four languages (EN/JP/DE/NL), published by: 't Japans Cultureel Centrum, Consept&Editing: Akitonixin)
• Coming up TOOLBOX: Exhibition, Building up/ Terms/ Sound, Video, Photography/ Graphics, Book Binding/ Sculpture/ Painting

http://akitonixin.com/