Year: 2021
Medium: single channel HD video with stereo sound, each
Running time: 9 min. 24 sec.
Edition: /home: #5/8 + 2A.P, /home (absence): #1/4 + 1A.P
Acquired from Ota Fine Arts, 2023
“/home” and “/home (absence)” is a two-paired video work, representing two sides of the content. The room shown in this video is the interior of the artist's childhood home, captured in its empty state following the relocation of the artist's parents in 2017. Home here symbolizes the connection to a place to return to and the family ties. For Sawa, who has been based in the U.K. for a long time, the home in his hometown must have been the one thing that provided a foundation for his Japanese nationality and his family as a place of belonging. The symbol “/” has various meanings, but when written as “/home,” it means the home directory in Linux program. Users are always placed in this location whenever they log into the system. This suggests what home means to Sawa. It is programmed into her subconscious to return there again. The loss of home experienced by Sawa is a shaking of his roots. In the empty room where the furniture has been removed, there are only traces of scratches and stains that suggest the appearance of the home in the past, with light and shadows coming in through the windows. The countless airplanes that come and go in this background visualize both the repeated departures and returns. On the other hand, in “/home (absence),” there are no airplanes but only sounds passing by. When one looks up from the ground to the far sky, the sound of airplanes chasing after shadows that are no longer there seems delayed. “home” is not a building, but a business. These two videos remind us of the fact that we are passing into the past, in which the home once existed for someone who should return there. These videos may be the traces and echoes of the business that called home.
