How to Breathe in a Lost Vat
Shown at: ‘Setouchi Triennial’, Hakkōza- Fermentation Hall, Kasaya House, Hiketa Area, Setouchi, Japan (2025)

200 year old saké brewery, architectural landscape, video projections, drawings, old vats, LED lighting sequencing, Paper prints

How to Breathe in a Lost Vat is an immersive art work located in a former saké brewery (Kasaya House) transformed into a public and performance space in the port town of Hiketa, by the inland Seto Sea (in Kagawa prefecture, on Shikoku island, south-eastern Japan). The work unfolds inside a former saké brewery, transforming Kasaya House into a site where time, matter and memory ferment together. The work reflects on fermentation as both process and metaphor. It thinks through how a substance becomes a spirit, time thickens into intoxication, and the way transformation occurs slowly, in the absence of breath.

It is an invitation to enjoy and reflect on the activity of fermentation that transforms a substance into a spirit, altering our senses and our sense of satisfaction.

Fermentation is the metabolic process by which organic molecules are broken down into substances like alcohols, acids and gases. This happens in the absence of oxygen, over time, and is triggered by the presence of a catalyst – usually a fungus or bacteria that acts upon the organic compounds by inducing chemical reactions. In the Sake brewing process this ‘agent’, a fungus, is called ‘koji’.

How to Breathe in a Lost Vat takes its form through circular image-works and circular video-projections that map on to the space, along side image-craters and vats embedded into a new raised floor-platform in Kasaya House. On the wall, circular spoke drawings transpose the form of a 24-hour clock on to the circle of a vat, the vessel for fermentation. Time stirs, brews, and ferments, the videos flickering alongside embedded cavities as well as embedded vats evoke the way in which koji animates organic mash, turning it slowly into saké. 

Kasaya House becomes a living vat; no longer brewing liquid, but distilling atmosphere, memory, and the intoxication of time.