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Nechi, Niigata, Japan

36°58'16.33"N, 137°53'7.06"E

Jan. 3 - 31, 2002
2009

This is the work I hung sheets on electric light posts. All the sheets were given by my host families who accommodated me in their homes during my travel. Trying to get involved in my home town where I no longer have my own home, I stayed with my friends and acquaintances while helping them shovel the snow. As I went on shoveling, I often crossed streets and avenues to clean neighbors’ territories. My voluntary service of removing snow in complicated avenues, some of which lead to their houses, pleased the neighborhood and I was invited to enter their homes several times. That is how I could get the chance to stay with strangers in my home town. My three weeks journey started with the house at a foot of a mountain and I moved from house to house through the kind introduction of the host families. I finally arrived at the house at the opposite site from the mountain. Every day, I stayed with others and that experience brought me a new discovery. Whenever I laid myself on different sheets before I slept, I felt different smells in respective sheet. In its color, I found something like a “hometown” in the most basic meaning, since everybody goes back to his or her original place at the end of the day. I paid my attention to the history of sheet, trying to imagine how human being since the beginning has repeatedly looked for a place to sleep at the end of the day. It seemed to me that these sheets were almost the same “place”.

I asked people who took care of me to hand over their sheets and connected them together to put on electric light posts at the foot of the mountain. The color of the sheets, which leads everybody to the place ending the day, stood out as “another village” only at night.