Reborn-Art Festival2021-2022

Materials:

Soil (from this site), Soil (from Higashimatsushima, Miyagi), Leaf mulch (from Momoura, Miyagi), Compost (from Ayukawa, Miyagi), Oyster shells (from Matsushima, Miyagi), Rice husks (from Wakuya, Miyagi), Rice bran (from Wakuya, Miyagi), Bamboo (from Momoura, Ishinomaki, and Higashimatsushima, Miyagi), Straw rope (from Fukui), Ogatsu stone (from Ogatsu, Miyagi), Approximately 50 varieties of heirloom and native plants, Neon, Solar panel, Rechargeable battery

Description:

In becoming conscious of the word “normal,” I found it necessary to constantly assess what my body lacked or had in excess in its attempt to adapt to its environment. What is commonly accepted as “productivity”—efficiency measured through labor and capital—also gives rise to structures of exclusion.

For those who have been excluded, survival in a world saturated with the rhetoric of personal responsibility means finding ways to remain connected: self to other, object to object, being to being. I wish for these connections to remain healthy—well, not in a normative sense, but in a relational one.

After all, perhaps no absolute “normal” truly exists. I have continued to ask: what does wellness mean, here and now, in a given place, between particular bodies and conditions? This inquiry is, at its heart, a dialogue with the environment—a continuous act of adjusting to the countless presences within it.

The area surrounding the Ishinomaki Minamihama Tsunami Memorial Park was once a residential neighborhood. After the 2011 tsunami, the topsoil was swept away, along with the diverse organisms that had lived in it. Though now leveled and “cleaned,” the land remains under municipal control. Nobody returns. The site lies just outside the boundaries of the park, unattended and forgotten.

In part of that forgotten land, I tilled the tightly shut soil. I amended it with leaf mulch and compost shared by farmers, former dairy workers, and gathered from nearby mountains. I enclosed the plot with bamboo to protect it from sea-salted winds. From native seeds, I grew forty kinds of vegetables.

In a way, native seeds themselves are also being excluded in our capitalist society. In the Anthropocene, as the global population has doubled, so too has the pressure on food and the soil that supports it—soil that can now only sustain production through artificial stimulation. Native seeds, with their irregular forms and slower growth, are deemed inefficient and unmarketable. They require annual planting and seed-saving to remain viable. Without circulation, these seeds inevitably decline—and disappear.

This is a project to reconnect: the forgotten land, the seeds that took root there, the cities that consume them, and the rural periphery that produces them. It is an attempt to reweave the severed relationships—between center and margin, between body and soil—that capitalism has left fragmented. It is an act of land making contact with the world again.

Supported : Akama Satoyama Farm, Yuko Ito,  Wood shop Kameyama LLC, Oikawa Corporation, Shells Corporation, Tsuyoshi Koya, Masamichi Toyama
Cooperation : Nomura Motors Corporation, Kokoro-no-Mori Nonprofit Corporation, Fukahori Kenzai Corporation, Taiheiso
Photo by Taichi Saito