SANTANDER.- Octopus, Citrus, Human is the first institutional solo exhibition of Shimabuku in Spain, spanning video, photography, sculpture, installation and text from the early 1990s until now. Through his affective and humorous performative actions, Shimabuku relays the simplicity of daily coexistence and the beauty of interspecies interaction. His practice is firmly grounded in relationships, rather than creating specific objects, encouraging viewers to re-familiarise themselves with the natural world. For this exhibition, Shimabuku has created new works with the participation of local communities, both human and non-human, including an underwater piece installed and recorded on the seabed off the coast of Santander. The artist also created a work in collaboration with local residents who, together with the artist, created more than 100 personalized kites, which were then collectively flown in the outdoor amphitheater of Centro Botín.

Shimabuku (1969, Kobe, Japan) generates improbable encounters between diverse entities by wandering and exploring various places in Japan and abroad. The artist creates social and spatial experiments in nature and public spaces that are unrefined and unrestricted, allowing for the beings involved – a person, an octopus, a citrus – to engage at their own pace and with their own abilities. The entities engaged become the primary audiences of his interventions – an exhibition for monkeys, a sculpture for an octopus, a meeting between a fish and a potato. These encounters are documented via photography, video, sculpture or text, which are made public in exhibitions where convictions between nature / culture, process / artwork, audience / collaborator are overturned. His works emerge beautifully out of the mundane, of the artist’s own curiosity and desires, and evolve slowly over time, with certain protagonists manifesting themselves in variations across multiple experiments, adapting to new contexts and ecologies.

Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Director of Exhibitions and the Collection at Centro Botín and curator of this exhibition, said: “As the title of Shimabuku’s exhibition, Octopus, Citrus, Human, suggests, his work shows with great candor the same level of curiosity and engagement with all forms of living things, exposing the beauty and variety of interspecies interactions that can occur in the living world. Shimabuku has taken a special interest in the natural and social context of Santander and is developing several new works with the participation of local protagonists – human and non-human – that I believe will be perceived by our audiences with a kind of familiarity that is simultaneously charged with wonder.”

Octupus, Citrus, Human

In 2019 Shimabuku made a work titled Sculpture for octopuses exploring for their favorite colors, which consisted of an arrangement of glass marbles and self-made vases that were placed within an octopus aquarium. This experiment was based on the peculiar tendency that octopuses like to pick up and carry stones and seashells with them, and are inclined to enter narrow spaces, like a flower vase. For Centro Botín, Shimabuku has placed a larger version of the same vases on the sea floor off the coast of Santander: Going to meet the Octupuses of Santander (2024). The monument became an offering for the octopuses and a stage to observe his interactions, which were recorded underwater by a team of divers and the artist himself.

For the video Flying Me (2006), a lone, real size self-portrait of the artist drawn on the kite flies silently across a blue sky. Shimabuku worked with the local residents to create kites in their own likeness, which were flown simultaneously last Sunday, and will be displayed as an installation in the exhibition space.

The 2010 installation Something that Floats/Something that Sinks, featured fruits and vegetables circling each other (one above, one below) demonstrating an odd natural phenomena—certain fruits of the exact same species, float, while others sink. For the exhibition, the tanks will contain a selection of autumn citrus fruits from Todolí Citrus Fundació de la Comunitat Valenciana, a non-profit organisation created for the study and spreading of citrus and citriculture.

Other works included in the show expose or generate the displacement of living things from one place to another. Exhibition for monkeys consists of a series of photographs documenting the descendants of the Japanese snow monkeys that were relocated to a desert sanctuary in Texas in 1972 for a scientific experiment. Shimabuku was curious to find out if these monkeys still had a memory of the snow, despite not being in contact with it for generations, so he brought a pile of ice from a nearby gas station and observed their reactions. The film Fish and Chips (2006) documents the encounter between the constituent parts of the ubiquitous British dish by showing a potato embarking on an underwater tour of Liverpool to meet a fish. A series of early photographic works – Tour of Europe with One Eyebrow Shaved, 1991; Symbiosis: hyacinth & black gold fish, 1992; Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere, 1994; or Sitting on the wave, 1998 pay testament to his nomadic and ephemeral approach to art making, offering refreshing perspectives of life.

This exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, co-edited with La Fábrica that includes texts written specifically for this project by researcher Filipa Ramos and artist Philippe Parreno, as well as a conversation between Shimabuku and Bárbara Rodriguez Muñoz. Additionally, in 2025, Shimabuku will invite artists to participate in the Fundación Botín Art Workshop that he will lead in Santander as a closing to his exhibition. The exhibition is curated by Shimabuku & Bárbara Rodriguez Muñoz. Additionally, in 2025, Shimabuku will invite other artists to participate in thew Fundación Botín Art Workshop, which he will lead in Santander as a closing event for the exhibition.