Miwako Kurashima. *folding cosmos

Miwako Kurashima has created small space for meditation and tea, designed a furniture set for the space and selected artwork for the specific places in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion where she will conduct the tea ceremony (Bontemae) at different times. Metaphorical flowers sway over the water. Each art work and utensil has been carefully selected. With precise gestures, she condenses the wisdom that invites us to transcend Everything and gives us the chance to be part of it.

The Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona is a complete universe of beauty and dignity that incorporates the sensation of movement and shares the Japanese philosophical idea of the very small room that is usually dedicated as a study for mediation, and also for conversation with tea.
The *folding cosmos project is an expression of this very small Japanese room with its own cosmos, within which an enormous universe will expand. It also expresses the lightness and versatility of Japanese art.
The encounter in the Pavilion and the *folding cosmos project provides us with a new experience and develops a new sense of movement in space coming from a tiny flexible and dynamic cosmos of art, connecting the interior and the exterior in the Japanese manner.

Perceiving the sense of nature, visitors have a new experience of the tiny cosmos: the expansion of the universe of the Pavilion.

Collaborating artists: Mamoru Fujieda, Kineta Kunimatsu, Tatsuo Kawaguchi and Isamu Noguchi.

Miwako Kurashima (Hokkaido, Japan) is a designer and interior architect. After studying at University of Tsukuba (Japan, Industrial Design) , she completed her training in Oxfordshire ( Furniture Design) and NYC (Interior Design).  As a designer and director of * folding cosmos project  (2011 ~), she managed to integrate her works for Barcelona Pavilion (Mies van der Rohe), Maison Louis Carré (Alvar Aalto) and Villa “Le Lac” Le Corbusier into the collections of these institutions. Miwako Kurashima lives in Yokohama and Sapporo, sometimes gives lectures in Tokyo in Japan, and works around the world.