Axon: Creative Explorations

From 2019 to 2022, Mapped to the Closest Address (MaCA) was a transnational interspecies dance collective composed of Maharu Maeno, Catalina Fernandez, Alex Viteri Arturo, and Shuntaro Yoshida (Japan/Colombia & Ecuador). Jun Yamaguchi joined the collective for the 2022 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, an event that is part of Japan’s ecological planning to revitalise Niigata Prefecture’s satoyama regions. In this creative essay, we invite readers to explore the sonic world of our site-responsive performance, Turn Off the House Lights, which was presented within our installation, We Like to See Clumsy Seeming Mountains, at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial. Analogue photographs from the series Fuji Films: Every Picture Matters offer a glimpse into our archival practices, along with digital images of the performance and installation. Through collective choreographic practices, we entered into contact with other-than-human persons, using various devices to record our encounters and craft multimedia installations to share our archive. Our project aimed to highlight the entangled relationship between humans and non-humans and to shift anthropocentric perspectives. For over four years, we’ve met and gathered stories from fellow community gardeners, arborists, farmers, winery workers, friends, and family. This piece honours them.