Series – communities it’s still unnamed
This is a series of works presented annually at Nation-Building FES, a four-day camping festival created and organized by the artist’s own nonprofit since 2022. Held each May, the festival invites 100 participants to a vacant site where they construct a temporary nation—from its founding to its dissolution—by living together, building tents, and experiencing a simulated yet embodied collective life. Parallel to this process, the participants encounter a “relational field” designed by the artist, which emerges not through spectacle but through lived experience.
Drawn to this space in search of new encounters, inner reflection, or simply an escape from urban routines and digital noise, participants inhabit a place that feels both extraordinary and intimately domestic. The space subtly transforms their bodily perception—an accreted schema of daily habits—through shared living, gestures, and atmospheres. The installation is composed not of overwhelming objects, but of minimal interventions: bowls, cloths, fragments of furniture, or timber—materials imbued with the memories of the artist and former inhabitants. These elements appear as residual traces, quietly evoking presence through absence, and are intentionally designed to facilitate poetic temporality rather than impose meaning.
This series shares a foundational question with the artist’s ongoing work Home: What does it mean to be with others? How is relationality generated in the first place? Whereas Home unfolds over the long term as a sedimentation of everyday interactions, this series forms a temporary community—one that arises and dissolves over a brief span. It functions as a kind of ritual landscape, in which the texture of co-being emerges momentarily and then fades.
On the third night, all participants gather to sing and dance to a single song. In this ritual act, distinctions—of status, age, or assertion—are suspended, and each person confronts only the moment before them. What arises is a pre-linguistic sense of connectedness, a kind of holistic network of relation that cannot be named.
communities still it’s unnamed is not framed by an exhibition nor confined to a temporal event. Rather, it is a practice that produces an unnameable time and landscape—one that flows only between people. It is not the completion of a work nor its observation that matters, but the lingering sensation of “having shared time together,” and the continuation of that relationship beyond the space. This is a repeated gesture of quiet resistance—an artistic practice that finds significance not in representation, but in lived, remembered, and sustained proximity.
Series
2022/05/01-04 “an Encounter”.
2023/05/04-07 “a forest – communus”
2024/05/03-06 Once the glass is filled and the water spills onto the earth, we can no longer tell it apart from the world.
2025/05/03-06 I found it(you).
©kazutomo suzuki, All Rights Reserved.