Nu-Pieds Setouchi
Location: Japan, Seto Inland Sea
Dates: 2017–2020
Overview: A territorial revitalisation across the Murozumi peninsula and the islands of the Seto Inland Sea.
“Before moving my research to the modern ryokan of Island Academy, I had the chance to live in a 120-year-old wooden house in the tiny village of Murozumi, on the edge of the Seto shores. Tiny, yet inside it I felt like a queen.My perception of space shifted, and from within, I came to understand the question of Ma. The house was later taken. What it taught me remains.”
A territory is not a place.
It is a relationship between a community, its resources, its memory, and the way it inhabits what surrounds it.
Working across the Murozumi peninsula and the islands of the southern Seto Sea, in cooperation with Kokusai Boueki and Island Academy, the project engaged every register through which a place produces meaning: the houses people abandon, the salt they once made, the flowers that grow on shores still marked by industrial pollution, the rituals that gather a village at year's end.
The work covered every aesthetic register of the territory:
salt production on the small island of Ushima, a cosmetics line built around neroli from the once-polluted shores of Minamata, Kyūshū, a boutique in Fukuoka to showcase the products, the renovation of old fisherman houses in Murozumi village, the identity of local restaurants and market spaces.
A reading of the territory delivered through every register the project touched:
living, sport (SUP, bouldering), health (conferences, drum circle), local resources (neroli, salt, seaweed), with the work of Sensei Shogo Arai. A collective of local and shared knowledge.
