Dedicated to the workers of the Komagaoka Recycling Center.
Some weeks ago, at the Komagaoka Recycling Center, I witnessed a choreography of necessity: a cold, repetitive rhythm, tightly governed time, and a machine-like discipline imposed on the human body. This exhibition is a response to that weight.
From March 2–6, I synchronized my life to the recycling center’s clock. Working from 8:45 to 17:00, I adopted their 50-minute cycles and strict 10-minute breaks, with a lunch break from 12:00 to 13:00. I used their rhythm as a formal constraint to “recycle” my own daily waste: sorting, handling, and transforming the packaging waste of my stay in Tenjinyama into sculptural objects with repeated shapes. In this process, time became a structure, repetition a method, and fatigue a form of reflection.
This exhibition brings together the objects produced, video documentation of the cycles, and an archive of my waste. Here, “waste” is revealed as more than a material endpoint; it is a temporal and infrastructural condition.
Our systems of consumption privilege the immediate and the seamless, yet the processing of that consumption relies on slow, invisible, and disciplined labor. While dominant narratives of the future promise efficiency and “bright” progress, the reality of the hands sustaining that future remains prolonged and obscured. By making these hidden temporalities visible, this work asks: can we truly call it “progress” when the labor that sustains it is designed to be forgotten?
Exhibition at Sapporo Tenjinyama Art Studio from March 10 to 22, 2026