Takigahara Farm, Ishikawa, Japan 2023. Passenger Program Artist Residency 001.
(Text & images featured in Cult Classic Magazine, 2024)
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Dragonflies are emissaries.
Small, flying emissaries of Earth to be more precise. If you walked gently through the grounds of Takigahara Farm, an ancient rice paddy nestled along the west coast of Japan, you could meet one. Instead of a political negotiation, the dragonfly would engage you in a symbiotic exchange.
Centuries ago, Japanese farmers considered the dragonfly a spirit of the rice paddy and a symbol of good health within the field. A dragonfly's reliance on water throughout their life–from egg, to larva, to adult–makes them important environmental indicators of healthy ecosystems.
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When Aerthship arrived at Takigahara Farm, a thousand dragonflies flew around us.
In the distance, goats maa’d, and a neighbor tended to their garden with a sleeping cat nearby. It felt like a Miyazaki film.
Aerthship was there to host our first artist residency and invited artists from around the world to join us. In the first hours, Mimi Zhu led the artists on a silent, meditative out to a circle of chairs, surrounded only by oak trees. There, the artists shared names, hopes, and dreams – a yearning to be in safe company amongst each other, dragonflies, and gentle sunlight emerged. We felt held by each other and the land we sat on, surrounded by the reciprocal exchange with everyone and everything there.
Symbiosis manifested in those initial moments in the field and became a habit in the days to come. We knew we needed to give something of ourselves, if we were going to receive wisdom from this place.
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Listening became the first step to give.
Bernie Kraus is a soundscape ecologist who studies the acoustic relationship between all living organisms and their environment. One of his studies recorded a group of Great Basin Spadefoot Toads that gather and sync their croaks around vernal pools at Mono Basin near Yosemite Park. The croaking functions in two ways: competing for mates, but also the synchronization of their sound becomes a pattern that cloaks them from predators.
His recordings also captured the anthroprophonic pollution of the nearby U.S. Navy Jet pilots, who flew overhead the pools at 1000 km/h. The recording’s sonograph visualized a break in the smooth synchronized waveform of the Toads’ croaking when the jets passed by. Moments after recording this, Kraus watched coyotes and horned owls pick off a few of the toads as they attempted to resynchronize their croaks over the course of 45-minutes.
At Takigahara Farm, we were hyper-conscious of sound, particularly the ones we made… the sound of our footsteps when we walked on gravel, our voices as we entered conversations or rooms or new landscapes, as to not pollute the serenity with disruptive commotion.
When we listened, we no longer felt like artists simply gathered on land, but in deep relation to it. We became aware of our role and were shown the ways we could contribute, instead of just taking…
One afternoon we strolled through a small section of the town. There were around seven neighboring homes in the area–all friends & community of Takigahara farm. We visited the goats as they chomped away at lunch in a nearby shrubland accompanied by their wrangler Ryo, Takigahara’s resident caretaker.
Guided by Anna Jensen, our gracious guide and Takigahara’s food director, we visited the Mountain School down the street, where elders, local farmers, and families would gather for a monthly meal. Our group piled into a sunbathed kitchen. Among soup, rice, and tea, we served boar. We obtained the meat from an ex-mma fighter turned park ranger, Sakura-san, who transformed the way the region handled their population control, so that the boar meat could feed communities instead of going to waste. We sat and dined alongside people who directly benefited from her.
Later, we explored the farmland, and adjacent trails that led into the old growth forests. We climbed into the Takigahara Stone Quarry, first excavated in 1814–a Japanese Heritage Site, and an intimidatingly beautiful human-made mega-structure cut from the side of the mountain. Much of the rock extracted from this quarry was used as the building blocks of Takigahara’s buildings:
the Takigahara House, a renovated rice storehouse vault, The Omoya or Mother House, the Moss Wine Bar, the hostel where we stayed, the café which hosted daily lunch, and the wood workshop – all historic buildings, lovingly cared for over the centuries..
As we contributed more our experiences blossomed further.
We befriended Kuro, the farm dog by pulling down fresh persimmons, tossing them straight into his mouth, and dined together over food that took all day to prepare, sourced from neighboring farmers. We shared personal films and stories, wrote out our feelings, and took photos. We celebrated three birthdays in one night, then partied to a back-2-back-2-back DJ set with Mimi Zhu, Miles Lawton (DJ Lawson) and Matthew Bentley (063N13) at the Mother House – inspiring a surprise performance by resident artist, Ho Wong. We met an 8th generation Koji maker and witnessed an annual blessing event for knife-makers, who come from a line of blacksmiths that once outfitted Samurai. We hiked Mt. Kurakakeyama’s north face and helped each other down its rocky cliffs in the dark. We touched moss at the moss garden, and felt the rain on our faces at an Onsen nestled between a hill side and a raging river.
We didn’t create a pressure to sum all of the above into an output, a final product – we didn’t set out to form that kind of artist residency. But through Mimi Zhu’s guidance, we wanted to create an intimate connection to the land by embodying a deep presence. One which embraces symbiosis with one another, with nature, to connect to a place and collect memories we can draw inspiration from forever.
The following images are the collective memory bank of Aerthship and residents of Passenger Program.