You begin in taste. Bitter, metallic traces linger on the tongue. One floor presents decay — narezushi, mist softened in salt. Death is immediate, material, palpable. It hisses somewhere on the surface, a resonance in the lungs, a vibration that insists on your attention. Dissolves into an endless state of mourning.
Time is not absence; it is motion beneath stillness, here life unfolding into what has never ended.
Ascending, the staircase becomes a transit. The sound thickens. Each step triggers subtle movement: jars shift, leaves tilt, liquids ripple. Kinetic elements respond within your absence, weight, gesture. Death here is a bitter step — it moves around you, through you, in an uncontrolled resonance of being. On the other floor, kasuzuke occupies the liminal. Soil of past vegetables and brine drifting in a loss —between states. Suspended jars rotate or sway, low-frequency sounds pulse from beneath the floor, tracking proximity and breath. Time stretches. You sense decay unfolding slowly, untraceable. Death as birth is a patient process, an active force shaping matter.
At the center, the rice-bran bed waits. Nukazuke reacts to the past: stirring produces vibration, so it is a subtle movement across the surface. Frozen yuzu drops descend periodically, evaporating into the awaking fog. Their ephemeral presence contrasts the persistence of decay, reminding you that birth and death coexisting waves. We move through loops of transformation. Smell, sound, vibration, and touch merge. Death is present, persistent, and responsive. Each interaction reverberates through the installation: our body becomes part of the process, our presence folding into its motion. The unknown is structured — kinetic, olfactory, auditory — a suspended ecosystem where decay, transformation, and emergence are inseparable. We feel it: the resonance of what has ended, and the quiet insistence of what never.
