About the artwork

We hoped to combine transience, hope, freedom, infinity, and the ancestor rites performed at the autumn equinox in a single project. And, finding a form for those aspirations, we created a festival in which we took part, with hordes of others, for four summer nights in Echigo. We all like balloons. We liked them when we were children, and we still like them. And a balloon is a symbol of hope and freedom, escaping from gravity toward infinity. Thus, we wanted to put lights in balloons. Our ancestors used lights symbolicaly in summer ceremonies: welcoming and seeing off with fire, lantern festivals during the festival of the dead, lights at Tanabata (the festival of the weaver maiden and the cow herd, doomed to meet but once a year), letting lanterns float out to sea. Working in light as a symbol, we sensed its long pulse of life. The festival of the dead has been a part of the history of lights from time out of mind. Lights are for death, memory, forgetting and life. And we want not only to share those meanings but create happy summer nights that were not frighted with meaning. We could like to express our gratitude to all the people who helped us, to the nearly ten thousand people who attended the festival, and to the site where the project took place.