The artist opened what was once his family home to others and has continued to share it with people who are not related to him. Living together does not mean fully understanding one another. Yet the presence of others, and small, everyday acts they may barely notice themselves, can change another person's life.
We can never fully understand one another. But this does not mean we have nothing to do with each other. We continue to affect one another's lives without ever fully knowing each other. This unresolved tension is where the work begins.
Rather than recreating these relations or turning them into symbols of connection, the artist composes a space in which people, objects, and place can act upon one another.
The installation brings together a dining table and chairs, a clothesline hung with garments worn by people from the shared household, and everyday objects such as cups and dishes. Some have been brought from the home in Japan, while others were acquired in Venice. They are not props for recreating domestic life, but things that have actually been used, or are beginning to be used here.
A chair moved by one person remains where it was left for someone else to find. The weight of the clothes makes the line sag. The position of the table and the distances between objects shape how people sit, stand, and move through the space. Objects do more than carry or symbolise memories of everyday life. As we act upon them, they also shape what we do.
Visitors may sit, use or move objects, talk, or leave without doing anything. People who share the artist's home may also spend time in the space, but they are not asked to perform or follow instructions. The artist does not stage encounters as proof that a relation has taken place. Even without conversation, agreement, or mutual recognition, we live with the changes brought about by the actions of others. Distance, silence, hesitation, and friction all have a place here.
In dialogue with relational aesthetics and collaborative artistic practices, the work does not treat visible encounters as the only evidence of relation. Relations are already at work, even when they do not appear as events we can recognise or explain.
Édouard Glissant's right to opacity opens the possibility of relation without reducing others to what we can understand of them. Hartmut Rosa's concept of resonance describes a relationship of response and transformation that cannot be produced at will or controlled in its outcome. Drawing on these ideas, the artist does not direct relations towards a predetermined result. Instead, he composes the material conditions in which they may arise.
There is no single finished arrangement to which the work must return. Through the placement, weight, distance, and interplay of objects such as the table and the clothesline, the artist gives the space its initial sculptural form. Over time, objects are moved and worn, and people come and go. The artist remains responsible for the sculptural conditions that sustain the work, but does not undo changes simply to restore an image he prefers. The work continues not by fixing a particular state, but by keeping open the possibility of being changed by others.
The exhibition is one phase of a life already underway, opening that life to new people and places. Objects brought from the household will return to their owners after the exhibition and become part of everyday life again.
The questions at the heart of this work cannot be separated from the artist's own life.
When his mother died by suicide, he was confronted with the fact that caring deeply for someone is not the same as fully understanding them, nor does it mean being able to save them.
That day, friends, companions, and people with whom he had simply shared a home gathered around him. Having opened his home and worked to make a place for others, even through conflict and the limits of mutual understanding, he came to realise how deeply his own life had been sustained by their presence, often without his knowing.
Someone we thought had nothing to do with us may already have shaped our present. And we, in turn, are quietly changing the world someone else is about to enter.
What does it mean for us to be together?
Ownership and Continuation
Owning this work does not mean preserving or reproducing particular pieces of furniture or their arrangement. Any future transfer will be accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity and a Reinstallation Protocol issued by the artist, defining the conditions essential for the work to retain its identity and the elements that may change with different people and places.
What the owner inherits is not a fixed final state, but the right to realise the work again elsewhere, together with the responsibility to sustain the conditions in which relations can arise.
