Maya Erin Masuda

Nyoro-bara-pichapicha machines is a site-specific work, which explores the idea of “machines with care” formed between the environment, local community and human hands. After the advent of capitalism, the “machines” which were once unstable, improvised, and often transitory turned into stable, perfected, isolated entities. Their circuits and hard exterior became more closed so that the users wouldn't touch, and uniform plastic covers were adopted suitable for mass production. Stability, eternity, closedness- considering those patriarchic autistic features expected in machines overlaps with the desire of human beings that created them, the artist aims to open a small crack to both by finding the alternative in the representation of machines.

During the process of making Nyoro-bara-pichapicha machines, the artist collected various materials (branches, soil, city waste such as a broken piece of wall) while walking around the city. By adopting city ruins and local organic material inside the machines, she attempts to embrace the practice of “repair" into the world-making. In addition, as the work has organic substances inside the circuit, the work adopts the process of oxidation and corrosion. Unlike the machines we have in our society where functionality, endurance and stability are the priority, the machines here are fluid, unstable and constantly responding to the outside climate. Parts of the circuit will be submerged in water, causing organic substances to dissolve over time. In this process, the moisture will also soak into the wall, obscuring the contour of the machine itself.

Through exploring the creation of a temporal machine that corresponds with the environment, the work proposes a speculative future in which technology does not exist to divide but to coexist with their environments, humans and more-than-humans counterparts. Technological creations and machines can too uphold the concepts of locality, sustainability and care.

Having previously explored the representation of machines that are open to vulnerability from a perspective of care, throughout her recent work Maya has conducted extensive research on the skin and morphological abnormalities found on animals left behind in Chornobyl and Fukushima. By transforming the skin and structure of the machines she explores based on this research, she attempts to reverse-engineer the accumulated record of geo-trauma brought about by humans within the speculative futurity she presents. It is a practice that attempts to dislocate a facet of technology that has been accelerated through war and invasion, as well as an attempt to de-anthropocentrise its representation.

Fragmented narratives from indeterminate subjects and the fragments of images that bear resemblance to landscapes, animals and human skin, pose questions concerning post-humanism, post-intimacy, be-longing, pain and queerness in the foreseeable future.

The work explores how the negative legacy imposed by technology has transformed our perceptions of gravity, the concept of inside and outside, and our understanding of the planet. As Timothy Morton calls the long-lasting trauma caused to a certain ecological community that lasts far beyond human sense a “Geo Trauma”, the dark traces of human life have seeped into the ground, into the air, and into our very perceptions of time, distance, proximity and intimacy. Expanding from her previous works, Maya explores how we can collectively care and situate ourselves together in such ecological traumas, drawing on the contemporary discussion surrounding reproduction, desire and be-longing.