April 21 – 24, 2023
🏡 Untitled Space, Kyojima, Tokyo

Kyojima, the island of today

Kyojima, today’s island,
murmurs drifting under half-open genkan,
conversations in the shade—about rain, about sunshine—houses stretching, bending,
the hymn of the shōtengai.
Is it countryside, or a city?
The Skytree watches over, belly full of fireflies,
alleys winding with stray cats, corrugated roofs.
Fires spreading, halted by new houses—stone, not straw.
Young shoots piercing through concrete, asphalt, earth.
Semi-public pots flirting with life.
While waiting for the tsunami, we enjoy this island,
a future Atlantis.
What we do here is proto-archaeology,
a kind of contemporalogy.


This exhibition is rooted in our documentary practice, through which we have been exploring urban contexts since 2016, with a particular interest in Japanese cities and their dynamics of revitalization. Since 2019, our focus has turned to the city of Onomichi (Hiroshima Prefecture), after a period of volunteering with the Onomichi Akiya Saisei Project, renovating vacant houses. In 2022, we discovered a distant cousin of Onomichi in Tokyo: Kyojima (Sumida-ku), where Thomas lived for a year. It shares surprising similarities with Onomichi: the bubbling of paradoxical forces—where the outdated hybridizes with the contemporary, where zoning pressure collides with the resilience of informality, where disaster risk coexists with the serenity of daily life, where traces of deep time meet the horizon of disappearance.

We sought to capture these energies and make them perceptible by producing a documentary of a peculiar kind. This time, the documentary is not photographic. The human figure is no longer central. No people. Not even architecture in a strict sense. Instead: plants. Arrangements. DIY. Animals. Shapes. Textures. The human is present only in traces, in the background—in our gaze, in our gestures, in various degrees of agency and representation. Wandering, drifting, and gathering form the basis of this herbarium of materials: sensations, photographs, found objects.

We paid special attention to in-between spaces, both private and public: the fronts of houses. These are spaces of coexistence and negotiation. Flower pots (hachiue) are arranged, while more informal forms of life also seek to nest in the interstices. Plants, called “invasive,” spontaneous, wild. Mini-altars of greenery are assembled with makeshift materials among discarded objects, forming urban sculptures waiting to be recognized at their true value—found sculptures. Birds land there, bees forage, cats wander, Kyojima’s turtles rest.

These spaces of creativity abound and are particularly vivid in this neighborhood. What we propose is the fruit of our gathering, moving from factual (photographic) representations to different modes and degrees of artialization—from installation to sculpture to painting—while also resonating with the identity of UNTITLED space through in situ interventions. Each attempt seeks to touch, draw out the essence, and share these forms of vernacular beauty particular to Kyojima.


An exhibition by Disconoma (Fanny Terno & Thomas Vauthier)
Concept and direction: Thomas Vauthier