EMI KUSANO - Techno-Animism: Children's Guardian - Kamikakushi Summer 96 III

Technique: Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art paper
Image size: 48 x 27 cm
Edition: 5 + 1 AP
Year: 2023

In Kamikakushi Summer 96 III, Emi Kusano shifts her techno-animist vocabulary into another dimension: from the green, protective creature outdoors to an almost sacred interior design. Against the deep blue horizon of the sea, a girl stands in a light yellow dress and cap, her arms lowered, her face serious and fixed on the viewer. In her hands, she holds a small black robot, plump, shiny, with red eyes—an object somewhere between toy, fetish, and totem.

The space in which she stands resembles a techno-spiritual sanctuary: between ancient columns hang rows of relics, lanterns, and mechanical figures resembling altar implements. Kusano stages a technoid-baroque iconography here, reminiscent of Shinto shrines as much as postwar modernist consumer temples. Behind the childlike figure stretches the sea, motionless, eternal—a contrast to the fleeting splendor of the artifacts.

The image evokes the ambivalence of the year '96: It is the era in which robots and Tamagotchis entered children's rooms, and simultaneously a time in which toys became a metaphor for cultural longing. Kusano exposes this layer and elevates the robot to a cult object, held by a child who is both priestess and protagonist.

Thus , Kamikakushi Summer 96 III becomes a meditation on rituals in the age of technology. The black robot here is not a tool, but a guardian, an idol, perhaps even a minor deity, given new life in the child's hands. Kusano sets the stage for a future religion in which the boundaries between toy and relic, childhood and faith, technology and spirituality are finally dissolved.