Project Text:

News From Home – Yunotsu is a series of three free-standing photomontage works (each 150 × 100 cm), developed from over 3,000 photographs and hours of video recorded during our residency in Yunotsu and the wider Shimane region. Our starting point is documentary, rooted in careful observation of architecture, landscapes, rituals, workspaces, and everyday life. Through photomontage, these materials are reassembled into dense, layered compositions that move away from linear documentation toward a more imaginative and surreal register. Hundreds of image fragments coexist within each work, combining deliberate storytelling with chance juxtapositions. Rather than offering a single narrative, the compositions remain open-ended, inviting viewers, especially local residents, to recognize fragments, draw connections, and bring their own interpretations to the image.

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The works are shaped by the concept of akiya, vacant or abandoned houses and land left unused for extended periods, and by the idea of akiya art, which treats these spaces not as empty, but as charged with past, present, and potential futures. In Yunotsu, this vacancy extends beyond houses to abandoned farmland, tools, and interrupted histories. Visually, this results in compositions that feel precarious: elements tilt, overlap, sink, and re-emerge. Plants break through walls, objects lose their original function, and human traces linger without clear ownership. Decay and growth sit side by side. There is no fixed hierarchy between people, animals, rituals, craft practices, architecture, or nature. Instead, all elements circulate within the frame, reflecting the constant negotiation and instability we encountered in these spaces. Like an akiya itself, each photomontage holds loss and renewal at the same time, offering not a finished statement, but a place to look, return to, and read differently over time.

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​Our experience of Iwami Kagura in Yunotsu also informed the formal structure of the works. Attending performances we became attentive to both the craft embedded in the tradition and its visual structure in performance. Masks, costumes, and props are meticulously handmade, yet when performed they generate a charged visual field, where a strong central form is surrounded by movement, ornament, and accumulating detail. We were struck by the balance between control and chaos, and by how the mask often anchors the performance while the body below becomes a dense, shifting composition. This performative logic informed our sculptures. In the photomontages, masks are positioned toward the upper structure of the image, giving the works an almost bodily presence, as if they could step into the same staged, ritual space without feeling out of place.