STATEMENT OF WORK

Drawing parallels between human societies and the biological altruism and non-hierarchical collectivism of social insects, I investigate personal and communal concepts of home as organized temporary shelter. As a simultaneous practice of self-fortification and community-building, I engage collaborators/participants in the collective task of nesting habitats through assigned roles and acts of communicating, collecting and constructing that culminate in immersive superorganismic installations and performances. 

I am interested in how human communities might form and thrive without centralized leadership and power privilege. I explore models for this non-hierarchical human potential through eusociality, which is the highest level of organization unique to the social insect world, characterized by cooperative brood care and division of labor. I investigate biologically coded altruistic characteristics of social insects within female-dominated collectives, where a fertile Queen is dependent on sterile Workers for her existence while the colony depends on her for its reproduction. 

I create environments for provisional habitation, combined with sculptural garments/bags and masks that serve as my protective living and/or traveling gear. Interacting with these environments and objects, I invent ritualistic play that revives my childhood experiences in Japan and interprets and resists the influences of my culture, particularly the contradictions inherent in Japanese attitudes toward nature and the presumed natural order of society. 

Inheriting hyper-aestheticized sensibilities and rejecting the malicious patriarchal privilege under which I was raised, I harbor a deep-seated fear of the untamed environment, especially insects, while also paradoxically identifying with both the power and the vulnerability embodied in insect life. Dressed in my nature-proof garments, disguising myself as an insect, I surrender her/my powerless body to the habitat, where cultivated by others, we gain power through relationship. Embracing my fear of insects, I expose parallels between human societal organization and non-hierarchical social insect systems. I examine the concept of temporary community building, while questioning the privilege of human dominance.