Creating tenderness in a world that moves so fast: Fawn Rogers Interviews Ibuki Kuramochi

m/Other (2025), 10 min 27 sec | HD video

 

By FAWN ROGERS WITH IBUKI KURAMOCHI July 28, 2025

Fawn Rogers:  Your work holds space for intimacy and grief in a way that feels especially urgent today, weaving post-humanist imagery with personal and ancestral memory. What does it mean to create art that can carry that kind of tenderness right now?

Ibuki Kuramochi: Creating tenderness in a world that moves so fast, with constant pressure to appear strong, polished, and productive, is how I understand and stay connected to the world. I’ve never been able to separate my grief from my practice. It’s part of my body.

I don’t want to make work that hides vulnerability. I want to show it. I want to make space for it. This work is a fusion of things I’ve been thinking about for many years. The sadness I’m facing now, the loss, the influence of Kazuo Ohno’s Butoh, the philosophy of companion species. But it also questions the idea that mothering is only about giving birth or fulfilling a traditional maternal role. To me, motherhood is a condition, a gesture, a way of being-with.

In this chaotic, violent, and fragmented world, choosing to care for another being, whether human or not, feels like a global practice.

As my companion grew weaker each day, I fed him homemade food by hand. When I felt the sensation of his tongue, I felt joy. Just the fact that he was still alive that day brought me happiness.Those small, quiet moments were everything. That care was my art practice.

Soft Code, Hard Kin (2025) HD video, HD video TV monitor, chain, fur

FR: Grief doesn’t ask for permission. It arrives, it stays, it remakes us. In your work, I sense a commitment to lingering, not rushing toward closure. How do you live inside these unresolved spaces? How has your practice evolved while you live presently with grief?

IK: Butoh emerged in post-war Japan as an expression of grief and anger. I feel that the very essence of Butoh lies in the act of living with sorrow, not escaping it, but embodying it.

While creating m/Other, I was constantly thinking about his death. I also began reflecting on the arc of my work since 2019. The practice and emotions from those earlier works flow into m/Other, the narrative continues through the loss of my companion. Holding onto grief is painful, but it feels natural to me. I think I carry a Buddhist understanding of life and death, even unconsciously. In Buddhism, life and death are not separate. They are part of one continuous existence. Death is not the end; it’s a turning point toward another form of life.

In my installation Let Us Stay Together, I used the sound of my companion’s heartbeat and his bone, along with quotes from the book m/Other that I created for this show. The quotes came from a scene where women give birth to a dog. Life and death, they are part of the same breath.

m/Other (2025) HD video 
 

FR: Butoh, with its origins in postwar collapse, often explores the edges of transformation, grief, and the body’s limits. I could watch you perform for hours. How does Butoh function as a conceptual and physical framework for you when navigating themes like kinship, technology, and metamorphosis?

IK: Butoh is everything for me. It’s not just a style of movement. It’s how I understand the world. I first encountered it through Yoshito Ohno, and from the beginning, I felt like it gave me a place to exist. It allows you to fall apart, to become something else, to stay in the unknown.

Butoh is also how I explore transformation, not just emotional, but physical and even non-human. When I perform, I can become an animal, a machine, a ghost, a memory. It’s not acting. It’s something deeper, something that happens inside the body first. I think that’s why it works so well when I bring in technology or post-human themes. My body absorbs them, transforms with them.

m/Other (2025) HD video 
 

FR: In m/Other, you navigate the loss with such intimacy and tenderness, weaving memory into the work with a rare sense of interspecies kinship. That kind of gentle interconnectedness with all living things feels uncommon in contemporary art and culture, and I deeply admire the world you created in this exhibition, one with all beings in deep presence with one another. Do you reflect on what this kind of interspecies presence and care might suggest about what’s missing from human evolution or our current way of being? Also You draw from Donna Haraway’s philosophy of companion species. How do you see the boundaries between species, memory, and care dissolving in your work?

IK: Interspecies presence, for me, is not just symbolic. It’s a way of being with the world. It asks us to imagine care and kinship that extend beyond species, time, and even form.

I feel society places great importance on productivity and efficiency. It does not allow us to dwell on sadness or remain emotional. There is a kind of violence in that. When we suppress grief in order to function, it can feel as though we are abusing ourselves. I choose to remain with the grief, to move with it, to let it shape how I relate to memory, space, and the more-than-human world.

Donna Haraway’s idea of “companion species” really speaks to something I’ve felt in my body before I had words for it. When I lost my companion, I realized how much of him still lived in me, not just in memory, but in the way I move, breathe, grieve. The boundary between us dissolved a long time ago.

When I perform, I’m not only dancing with my own body. I dance with a transparent companion. It’s a continuation. I’m a body in ongoing relationship, with grief, with love, with something no longer visible but still completely alive in me.

m/Other (2025) HD video 

FR: I often feel like my materials are alive. Sometimes they cooperate, sometimes they resist me, sometimes they think alongside me. What is your relationship with your materials? Do they have agency in your process? Are you the maker, the collaborator, or something else entirely?

IK: For me, materials are symbolic and closely connected to the body. I feel that the term “collaborator” is the closest way to describe them. In both video and performance, materials respond to my body as they are, and often guide me into more multidimensional spaces where memory, narrative, and sensation overlap.

As a performance artist, I select materials that resonate with the body, materials that are performative in themselves. I’m drawn to textures, objects, or surfaces that carry presence and hint at an inherent narrative.

FR:  Can you tell us about the various materials you used in m/Other including the preserved umbilical cord, in Japanese tradition is such an intense symbol in this exhibition. How do you see this symbol expanding ideas of family, lineage, and inheritance?

IK: When I first saw my preserved umbilical cord, it looked like dried squid or fish. It felt mysterious and a little strange, something between life and death, past and present. In Japan, there are many beliefs about the umbilical cord. Some say if you place it in your coffin, you’ll be reunited with your mother in the afterlife. Others say swallowing it when you’re sick can heal you.
The work originally incorporating the cord was created in 2022, called Prenatal Memory and Species.
Human fetuses initially have a fish-like form in the womb. Considering the theory of evolution, I started to see fish as a kind of intersection—between species, between past and present, between human and other. The umbilical cord, with its resemblance to dried sea creatures, became a powerful image for that in-between space.
In the book m/Other, a fish appears in a dream and becomes pregnant with a dog child. This is my rewritten myth of the principle of motherhood.
In Japan, there’s a strong tendency to value family unity and kinship, influenced by the traditional household system. But this symbol, this dried, curled piece of connection, suggests something more fluid and open.

m/Other (2025) HD video
 

FR:. Porous Bodies and Shared Boundaries. The body in your work feels porous, leaky, beautifully entangled with the world. I think often about where I end and other beings begin. How do you experience your own edges? Are you dissolving, merging, or holding form? And is there freedom in losing shape?

IK: When I perform live, I feel as if my body becomes microscopic particles, expanding into another dimension, carried by the wind. It’s like dissolving into something unseen.

When I perform in video art, using digital media to freely expand and mix the body feels like a new kind of physicality. The digitally collaged body has even greater freedom, but to me, whether it’s physical or digital, it’s still dancing.

The performance is a code for transforming the body. The body becomes empty, and then it can be reborn as something else. In that state, I don’t hold a fixed form. I become porous. I become something new.

FR: The Images and Stories That Choose Us.  Sometimes, I feel the stories choose us. Certain images, memories and futures insist on being made. Sometimes for me all mixed together but in different visuals but common theme. In your work, are there experiences or understandings that haunt you, that keep returning until you give them space?

IK: Yes, there are certain images and feelings that keep returning to me. They appear, again and again, until I have to make something from them. The body, grief, others, and the discomfort of being in a female body. They all come back. They always find me.

The image of transforming into something non-human, like a fish, or a dog, keeps appearing. It’s about comfort and escape, but also about reimagining identity. Maybe because I’ve struggled so much with my own body and gender, those stories feel like a way to survive, or to rewrite myself.

m/Other (2025) HD video 

FR: Animals in your work don’t appear as symbols or metaphors, they feel like co-creators, as if you are becoming-with them. When you inhabit these animal forms, do you feel closer to understanding yourself, or do you become something else entirely? What do these animal bodies allow you to access that the human body alone cannot?

IK: When I create, I often begin from the discomfort of the female body. Growing up and living in Japan, I experienced deep misogyny under a patriarchal system. Over time, I developed a sense of distrust toward my own body, toward my own physicality as a woman. That distrust still lingers and troubles me.

The presence of animals brings me comfort. I think it’s because they do not share the same physical form as me. Their difference feels safe. 

m/OTHER performance
 

FR: Ultimately my own practice is about searching for harmony. The conflict of human nature with each other and the unbuilt world, the massive suffering we create is a big debilitating belief I have never been able to escape from. Sometimes I'm amazed I have been able to create anything at all, even the conflict of creating haunts me, the pollution I create and what for. Your work brings me into my heart. I greatly admire how you are able to share your suffering and let me feel the fragility of being alive, you don't rush, you explore the depth of the grief to the fullest with multi mediums including your body. Can you describe the darkest moments of exploring your grief and if that has evolved- how and if not where you find your strength?

IK: Thank you so much for your words, Fawn. They truly mean a lot to me. 

When I was struggling, I struggled with my body, my femininity, and my sense of self. It was a confusing and painful time.

I often felt disconnected, even from myself. In that darkness, caring for my animal companion became a quiet act of care for myself. That's why I return to the body in my work. It holds the memory of care, even when everything else feels uncertain. Dancing with sadness and all emotions in your body, this is the only way to deal in this chaotic world.

FR: If you were to curate a group exhibition including yourself who would you include?What is the title show will be? 

IK: If I were to have a group show titled m/Other,  I would include Ai Hasegawa’s performance-based video art I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin, Aki Inomata’s video installation I Wear the Dog's Hair, and the Dog Wears My Hair, Anicka Yi’s kinetic installation In Love with the World, Candice Lin’s mixed media sculpture The Long-Lasting Intimacy of Strangers, Fawn Rogers’ painting series The World is Your Oyster, Juliana Huxtable’s painting Dancing Tails in Foxxy Desert Tales, Lauren Lee McCarthy’s performance-based video installation Surrogate, Lisette Ros’s live performance and residue installation My Self, the Fetus, Lucy McRae’s kinetic installation Solitary Survival Raft, Patty Chang’s performance-based video Melons (At a Loss), Soeun Bae’s installation Transfusion Loop // Procedures of Careless Caretakers, Tabita Rezaire’s installation Sugar Walls Teardom, and Xandra Ibarra’s photographic performance series Molting in Pool from the Spic Ecdysis. I want to expand more the conversation of mother and otherness, companion species, post-humanism. WM