The Yoke was developed through extended reading of The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, undertaken alongside fieldwork across multiple farms in Japan.

Fukuoka’s natural farming philosophy — often described as “do-nothing” farming — proposes a return of agency to ecological systems, intervening only where necessary. Within the Yoke, this approach was translated into an exhibition framework concerned with attention, restraint, and the latent potential of overlooked space.

The project asked how such thinking might be extended to urban conditions: vacant plots, thresholds, and residual environments — the in-between.

Through collage, video, and an interactive dining encounter, visitors were invited to reconsider these “nothing” spaces as active fields. The work proposed the yoke (or yolk) of the city as a site of possibility — where what is marginal might become central.

One film component, The Mantis Perspective (2022), was projected not onto a wall but onto an existing architectural interruption — the gallery air-conditioning unit — treating infrastructure itself as a viewing surface.

Rather than offering solutions, the Yoke operated as a perceptual exercise: a call to look again at what is usually passed over.

The project was presented at Arts Itoya.

2022/10/17 The Yoke

CATALOGUE : archived

LOCATION : Saga Prefecture, Japan

WITH : Sachi Matsuzaki, Sierra Sanchez, Silvia Husek with Arts Itoya

this project is dedicated to Sachi-san and Hirofumi-san