People who will soon crash at Point Nem

This work was my graduation project at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. It is a 38-minute stereo drama and video installation themed around “losing one’s place to belong.”

The story unfolds in the format of a radio program. Its protagonist is modeled on a real person: former Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev. In 1991, while stationed aboard the Mir space station, the Soviet Union collapsed, and he was unable to return. The Baikonur Cosmodrome, from which the Soviet Union had launched rockets, was now located in newly independent Kazakhstan, which demanded enormous sums from Russia. Post-collapse Russia was economically bankrupt and could not pay. Krikalev remained in space for nearly a year, and when he finally returned, he was shocked by how much his homeland had changed.

Ten years later, the Mir space station on which he had worked was deorbited and sunk into the South Pacific at a place called “Point Nemo.” This is the spot farthest from any landmass on Earth, known as the “spacecraft graveyard.” Countless decommissioned satellites and space vehicles that once belonged to particular nations have been scuttled at Point Nemo, which has become a gathering place for machines that have lost their place in orbit.

I strongly empathized with Krikalev—who repeatedly lost his place both on Earth and in space—and with the spacecraft that sank at Point Nemo, having also lost their place to exist.

Today, there are many people who feel they have no place in society, or who suffer from a strong sense of alienation: foreign students like myself, migrants, refugees. It feels as though all of these displaced people’s consciousnesses gather in a kind of spiritual “Point Nemo.” I linked that sense to this drama.

Must we accept a world where someone always has to lose their place? And for those like me, who are searching for a place, or who have none, is it inevitable to fall into a spiritual Point Nemo? Through the borrowed voice of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, I want to raise these questions in this work.

Awarded the Mitsubishi Estate Award, 2024.
Exhibited at the InterCommunication Center [ICC] in 2024.