fantastic fields • ファンタスティック・フィールズ, 2024
January 2024
A collaboration with the Immigration Museum Tokyo, Ougi Junior High School Art Club, and the City of Adachi

Fantastic fields was a four-meeting workshop with Ougi Junior High School’s Art Club about ecological touch and nature’s queer performativities that I, クロエ [Kuroe], designed and co-facilitated with ご はん [Gohan], Mimi, and Asako as part of the Immigration Museum Tokyo’s Educational Program in Adachi City. In fantastic fields, each participant received a kit with laser-cut paper objects animated by geological rock classifications. Throughout the four meetings, we transformed these objects as means of self-mapping and autofiction within those paperscapes. Each meeting included a concept (the self, the environment, the future, and connections) that related to a rock category (igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic, and atlas), and after sharing landscaping art references we would edit our objects.

A garden with beautiful eternal flowers and butterflies was the start of a path that lead to a gathering of no-title life stories and cosmologies, with Japan’s Future emerging from the Milky Way. Circulation and Us contained students’ and teachers’ tactile breakdown of the nature-culture divide and the acceptance of change over destruction. We floated through two islands of individual perceptions of entanglements whispering to us the significance of the sense of self. We lastly landed at the Marriage of the Galaxy where we celebrated with our friends, proterozoic creatures, and kind aliens.

Photos by Ryohei Tomita.