Living Migration is an ongoing artistic project by Japanese artist Satoshi Murakami (b. 1988), presented here through two video works filmed in Japan in 2020. One was recorded in Tokyo, the other on the Noto Peninsula. Today, the works somehow resonate with renewed urgency, foregrounding questions of vulnerability, displacement, and the fragile conditions under which a place comes to be called “home.”
Murakami graduated with a degree in architecture from Musashino Art University in March 2011, the same month the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami struck the Tohoku region. In the wake of the disaster, as entire communities were erased and thousands of homes swept away, Murakami began to question what it means to own a house or land. While homes had physically vanished, many displaced residents remained bound to mortgage loans on non-existent properties—revealing a dissonance between shelter as lived space and housing as an abstract legal and economic structure.
These reflections led Murakami to initiate Living Migration, a performative project in which he constructed a small, portable house out of styrofoam and carried it on his back from place to place. Measuring 155 × 80 × 135 cm and weighing approximately 25 kilograms including his belongings, the house is temporarily placed on borrowed land, where Murakami seeks permission to stay the night. By reducing the house to a lightweight box, Murakami detaches the idea of home from permanence, ownership, and fixed foundations, challenging the assumption that stability must be rooted in immobility, property, or accumulation.
“First, a house – essentially a box – functions to protect one’s corporeal body from the elements and would-be assailants. Second, a concrete foundation attaches this box to the land. This foundation anchors inhabitants as long-term residents of a specific site, making it easier for the powers-that-be to collect taxes and manage citizens”
from “Alternative ways of living with artist Satoshi Murakami in Tokyo” by Grace Lovell and Yoshi Tsujimura
By removing the foundation, Living Migration proposes an alternative understanding of dwelling—one that is negotiated, temporary, and relational. The work asks how private and public spaces are defined, who is permitted to occupy them, and how individual modes of living intersect with broader social and political structures.
To open rum46’s 2026 exhibition program, “Home, Sweet Home”, Living Migration is presented through the glass façade of the exhibition space—pointing symbolically out into the public sphere. Throughout 2026, rum46 hosts an artistic investigation of home as refuge and necessity, but also as something that can be lost, denied, or never fully attained. In a time marked by war, migration, and inequality, the program approaches home as construction, crisis, and care—moving between bodily, performative, architectural, urban and national scales, and asking what it means to have a home, and who is allowed to claim.
