In 2020, I opened the house where I had once lived with my family as a shared home. During the COVID-19 pandemic, friends who had lost a place to return to began staying there. Others followed, arriving from different parts of Japan. At the time, I had no intention of creating an artwork. We were simply living together.
From the beginning, the house has had two rules. The first is to treat it as one's own home and share the housework. The second is to eat dinner together. These simple agreements have gradually shaped the way people relate to one another.
The dining table, in particular, has become central to life in the house. People arrive with different backgrounds, habits, and beliefs. Encounters can be awkward, and disagreements or conflicts sometimes arise. Yet through the repeated acts of cooking, eating, talking, and taking care of the house, the distance between people slowly changes. There are moments of affection and understanding, but also friction, loss, and grief. All of these have become part of the life that continues here.
Residents come and go, and visitors return at different intervals. Today, three people live in the house, while around twenty people visit each month from across Japan. The people who inhabit it are never quite the same, and neither are the relationships between them. Still, many find their way back, sometimes after long periods away.
It was through these ordinary experiences that I gradually came to recognize something central to my artistic practice. What interested me was not communal living as an ideal, nor the creation of a harmonious community, but the ways in which relationships take shape, change, and sometimes break down through the simple act of sharing everyday life. A meal, a conversation, a household chore, or a moment of silence can subtly alter how people live alongside one another.
Ie (Home) is not an installation that can simply be dismantled and reassembled elsewhere. Its form exists through the accumulation of time, the presence of those who live there, and the countless interactions that continue to unfold. Yet the objects, gestures, and experiences that emerge from this house have found their way into other works, taking on different meanings in different places.
The house remains an ongoing practice, changing with the people who pass through it. What began as an ordinary decision to share a home has become one of the foundations of my artistic inquiry into what it means for us to be together.
