WILD LIFE ーRecreating the Natural World

WILD LIFE ーRegenerating the Natural World

I've come to think lately that my life is wild life itself.

It's not an academic graduate student life, of course. Far from the quiet research life spent grappling with literature in the library from morning on. Nor is it the wild life of adventurers, travelers, or those who live in untamed environments. Not the style of traveling uncharted lands with a backpack on your shoulders.

I've been expanding pesticide-free rice farming environments to construct photography. The total area I've worked on amounts to 7 chō. In the rice fields I've gradually expanded from one tan, I observe biodiversity practically while working on environmental restoration. A remarkable diversity of life returns to rice fields without pesticides. This is agriculture and simultaneously a verification site for photographic theory and the Theory of Micro-Phase Differences.

From my house, I hear the sounds of wild birds—ducks, geese, snipes—frogs and insects. I'm giving them a wild life they can live in the environment of rice fields. However, when I began rice farming, they were not in these fields. What had declined most drastically were the aquatic organisms in the rice paddies—aquatic insects, reptiles, amphibians. Through pesticides and dry-field cultivation, their populations had been dramatically reduced. Wild birds also began arriving after I started winter flooding. They weren't there before. This is regeneration in the rice paddies, a secondary nature.

I eat the fish I catch. I love music and play guitar, and when I want to dance to House or EDM, I occasionally go out to the city and dance until morning. While researching photographic theory at Kyoto University of the Arts graduate school, I continue creating "Fujiko-han." I'm now past the 270-story mark.

All of these are integrated through the reciprocal movement between theoretical framework and practice. I'm not living in disorder. Rather, it's the process of becoming highly structured that is wild for me.

I always face the field. Whether it's the rice paddies, the river, or the dance floor. Theory arises from the field, and the field is reconstructed through theory. Within that circulation, nature regenerates, and my wild life emerges.