Takigahara Farm, Ishikawa, Japan 2023. Passenger Program Artist Residency 001.
(Text & images featured in Cult Classic Magazine, 2024)
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 in the field. A dragonfly’s reliance on water throughout its life—from egg, to larva, to adult—makes it an important environmental indicator of healthy ecosystems.
***
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 walk out to a circle of chairs surrounded only by oak trees. There, the artists shared their names, hopes, and dreams—a yearning to be in safe company among each other, dragonflies, and gentle sunlight. We felt held by each other and the land we sat on, surrounded by the reciprocal exchange between 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.
Listening became the first step in giving.
Bernie Kraus is a soundscape ecologist who studies the acoustic relationship between living organisms and their environment. One of his studies recorded a group of Great Basin spadefoot toads that gather and synchronize their croaks around vernal pools in the Mono Basin near Yosemite National Park. The croaking functions in two ways: it competes for mates, and the synchronization of their sound forms a pattern that cloaks them from predators.
His recordings also captured the anthropophonic pollution of nearby U.S. Navy jet pilots flying overhead at 1,000 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 several of the toads as they attempted to resynchronize their croaks over the next 45 minutes.
At Takigahara Farm, we were hyper-conscious of sound, particularly the sounds we made—the crunch of our footsteps on gravel, our voices as we entered conversations, rooms, or new landscapes—so as not to pollute the serenity with disruptive commotion.
When we listened, we no longer felt like artists simply gathered on land, but participants in deep relation to it. We became aware of our role and were shown the ways we could contribute instead of simply taking.
One afternoon, we strolled through a small section of town. There were around seven neighboring homes in the area—all friends and community members 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 host and Takigahara’s food director, we visited the Mountain School down the street, where elders, local farmers, and families gather for a monthly meal. Our group piled into a sunbathed kitchen. Among soup, rice, and tea, we served boar. The meat came from Sakura-san, an ex-MMA fighter turned park ranger who transformed how the region manages population control so the boar meat could feed communities instead of going to waste. We sat and dined alongside people who directly benefited from her work.
Later, we explored the farmland and adjacent trails that led into old-growth forests. We climbed into the Takigahara Stone Quarry, first excavated in 1814—a Japanese Heritage Site and an intimidatingly beautiful human-made megastructure cut from the side of the mountain. Much of the rock extracted from this quarry became 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 that 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 and tossing them straight into his mouth. We 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-to-back-to-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 eighth-generation koji maker and witnessed an annual blessing ceremony for knife-makers who come from a line of blacksmiths that once outfitted samurai. We hiked the north face of Mt. Kurakakeyama and helped each other down its rocky cliffs in the dark. We touched moss in the moss garden and felt the rain on our faces at an onsen nestled between a hillside and a raging river.
We didn’t create pressure to turn all of this into a final output or product. That was never the intention of this artist residency. Through Mimi Zhu’s guidance, we instead sought to create an intimate connection to the land by embodying deep presence—one that embraces symbiosis with one another and with nature. The goal was to connect to a place and gather memories we can draw inspiration from forever.
The following images are the collective memory bank of Aerthship and the residents of the Passenger Program.