​Concept:

In Japan, the population of children under the age of 15 has been declining for 37 consecutive years.
In Hiketa, Kagawa—where this work is exhibited—this reality is quietly embedded in the local landscape.This installation presents mosaic-like panels depicting children researched in Chicago, arranged throughout the space.The mosaic evokes the act of copying and pasting images on the internet, suggesting the transfer of bodies across distant locations.Children who should not exist in this place are “relocated” into Hiketa through a digital-like operation.This act functions as a speculative amplification of a diminishing presence, intervening in reality itself.Within the abandoned shipyard, an alternative scene unfolds—one that does not exist in reality, yet appears vividly present.It is both a residue of a disappearing future and an imagined, idealized landscape constructed through images.

This work questions the nature of existence in the face of irreversible population decline, employing the logic of digital reproduction and transfer to reframe how presence can be constructed.