Back home, after being home.
Trembling Aspen | Series 04_My Life Here | Issue_04
It's almost 9:30pm in Yokohama. I can hear, once again, the comforting sound of the train right outside my window. After unpacking I grabbed dinner with Ralph, Ness, Mishio, Yuri and Ari.
It was such a warm and wonderful feeling to be greeted by people who miss you, and who tell you so, and who express that with big hugs and wide smiles. This warm feeling coming right on the heels of saying goodbye, again, to other friends in my other home, some of whom I have known for a very long time, made all of it—the goodbyes and hellos on both ends—bittersweet. The taste of life is nuanced.
I made it all the way through dinner without falling asleep in my soup. Just now, while sitting up in bed, I made a bid to stay up just a little longer—you know, to mitigate the effects of jet lag and all that. I made an entry in my journal.
Here’s what that looked like...
(I like how I left a note to myself, just in case I didn’t know what was going on. I also like how it starts as an attempt at a word, then becomes a semicolon, and then...not a z because that would have been too on the nose, so yeah, let's go with s.)
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I’m back in Yokohama, back in Koganecho, and back in my little apartment in Hatsune Wing A. The studio downstairs is just a studio, white walls and cement floor. Sometime today I’ll be meeting with Theo to pull the green carpet of artificial turf out of storage. I will re-unroll the spirit of KocoGarden and KocoGarden 2.0 will be born.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be sending out a feature about each of the cryptic scribbles below. It's difficult to communicate the thrill—a combination of slight healthy fear and joyous excitement—I feel when I'm working on the projects these scribbles represent.
As I settle into the work ahead, I can’t help but feel grateful to those of you who have supported me, body and soul, over the past year. All the more sweet for having just seen many of you in person over the last month. Which brings me to...
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I make collaborative art, participatory art, interactive new media installations, abstract visual art, and I publish. I explore themes of home, identity, and belonging.
Interdependent means I can't do it alone. I need your help. And that, it turns out, is a wonderful thing.
Hey, I’m Steve. I’m an artist-in-residence in Yokohama, Japan. I believe art is a verb. Art-making and community-building are two great verbs that go great together. I do both, sometimes together. I write about it all at the Trembling Aspen newsletter.
I’m learning out loud so we can learn together.