August 27–28, 2022
🏡  Nakacho no ie, Tokyo 

Sorry, I have to live 

After a first edition in France in 2019—an overnight stay in a museum to experiment with a different relationship to artworks—we renewed this process in Tokyo at the end of August 2022, during a weekend of exhibitions and performances at Nakacho no ie, a former Shōwa-era house converted into an art space. The aim was both simple and radical: to inhabit the exhibition site as much as possible, working with its domestic past while confronting its new institutional rules.

Quickly, prohibitions piled up: no food or drink for the audience, no sleeping, no living beings allowed inside… In response, we decided to play with these constraints by proposing to “live” in the space during opening hours. Asked by the curatorial team to define precisely what “living” meant, we inscribed a multitude of actions on cards—later expanded by the public—which became micro-scores activated by visitors: stretching, eating lunch, napping, dancing, writing a haiku, chasing a mosquito, watering the garden…

Dressed in pajamas, with futon and domestic objects (fan, games, books, embroidery tools, TV, nagashi sōmen, etc.), we created a hybrid space between performance and daily life. Visitors, transformed into guests, participated in composing a repertoire of collective, shared actions.

Sorry I have to live was less a performance in the classical sense than an “emotional weather,” dependent on the shifting moods of participants. It sought to restore to the exhibition site a dimension of sociality, spontaneity, and shared life—like the engawa, the threshold between house and garden where private and public intertwine.


Original concept: Thomas Vauthier
Co-realization: Disconoma (Fanny Terno & Thomas Vauthier)