Every time I go back to my hometown, Kochi, a provincial city in Japan, I notice that the surrounding nature is slowly taking the land back from people due to the population declining. In the outskirts, I often encounter artificial objects melting into the surrounding nature, such as weed-ridden playgrounds with rusty equipment, deserted buildings and houses occupied by animals and insects, and discarded farm land. They look like fusions of our culture and the surrounding nature, and they lead me to think about the unclear borderline that exists between human and natural dynamics. These fusions sometimes remind me of our bodies as containers of natural and cultural elements, which often cause conflicts and contradictions within ourselves. With my interest in how this tension manifests itself inside and outside of our bodies, I’m exploring these marginal areas physically and metaphysically.
As one of the things that we can find in both our cultural and natural environments, I am interested in circulation systems in general and how they are often working to make themselves self-sustainable. The cycle of water and evaporation; oxygen and carbon dioxide through plant photosynthesis and our breathing; astronauts drinking water made out of their urine or the recycling system of spent nuclear fuel, to name a few. Inspired by these circulation systems around us, Not So Still Life series presents my imaginary designs of circulation systems where both artificial and natural objects are organically related to one another and work together in a closed cycle. I created these systems as if they were fully automatic and working only for sustaining the systems themselves instead of producing something useful for us. |
