Dragonflies are emissaries.
Small, flying emissaries of Earth to be more precise. If you walked gently through the grounds of Takigahara Farm, an ancient rice paddy nestled along the west coast of Japan, you could meet one. Instead of a political negotiation, the dragonfly would engage you in a symbiotic exchange.
Centuries ago, Japanese farmers considered the dragonfly a spirit of the rice paddy and a symbol of good health within the field. A dragonfly's reliance on water throughout their life — from egg, to larva, to adult — makes them important environmental indicators of healthy ecosystems.
***
When Aerthship arrived at Takigahara Farm, a thousand dragonflies flew around us.
In the distance, goats maa’d, and a neighbor tended to their garden with a sleeping cat nearby. It felt like a Miyazaki film.
Aerthship was there to host our first artist residency, inviting artists from around the world to join us. In the first hours, Mimi Zhu led everyone on a silent, meditative journey out to a circle of chairs, surrounded only by oak trees. There, the artists shared names, hopes, and dreams — a yearning to be in safe company amongst each other, the dragonflies, and gentle sunlight. We felt held by each other and the land we sat on, surrounded by the reciprocal exchange with everyone and everything there.
Symbiosis manifested in those initial moments in the field and became a habit in the days to come. We knew we needed to give something of ourselves, if we were going to receive wisdom from this place.
***
Listening became the first step to give.
Bernie Kraus is a soundscape ecologist who studies the acoustic relationship between all living organisms and their environment. One of his studies recorded a group of Great Basin Spadefoot toads that gather and sync their croaks around vernal pools at Mono Basin near Yosemite Park. The croaking functions in two ways: competing for mates and creating a synchronized sound that cloaks them from predators.
His recordings also captured the anthropophonic pollution of the nearby US. Navy Jet pilots, who flew overhead the pools at 1,000 kilometers per hour. The recording’s sonograph visualized a break in the smooth, synchronized waveform of the toads’ croaking when the jets passed by. Moments after recording this, Kraus watched coyotes and horned owls pick off a few of the toads as they attempted to resynchronize their croaks over the course of forty-five minutes.
At Takigahara Farm, we were hyper-conscious of sound, particularly the ones we made… the sound of our footsteps when we walked on gravel, our voices as we entered conversations or rooms or new landscapes, so as not to pollute the serenity with disruptive commotion.
When we listened, we no longer felt like artists simply gathered on land, but in deep relation to it. We became aware of our role and were shown the ways we could contribute, instead of just taking…
One afternoon we strolled through a small section of the town. There were around seven neighboring homes in the area — all friends and community of Takigahara Farm. We visited the goats as they chomped away at lunch in a nearby shrubland, accompanied by their wrangler Takigahara’s resident caretaker, Ryo.
Guided by Anna Jensen, our gracious guide and Takigahara’s food director, we visited the Mountain School down the street, where elders, local farmers, and families gather for monthly meals. Our group piled into a sunbathed kitchen. Along with soup, rice, and tea, we served boar, which we obtained from an ex-MMA fighter turned park ranger, Sakura-san, who transformed the way the region handled animal control, so that the boar meat could feed communities instead of going to waste. We sat and dined alongside people who directly benefited from her.
Later we explored the farmland and adjacent trails that led into the old growth forests. We climbed into the Takigahara Stone Quarry, first excavated in 1814, a Japanese heritage site, and an intimidatingly beautiful human-made mega-structure cut from the side of the mountain. Much of the rock extracted from this quarry was used as the building blocks of Takigahara’s structures: the Takigahara House, a renovated rice storehouse vault, the Omoya or Mother House, the Moss Wine Bar, the hostel where we stayed, the café that hosted daily lunches, and the wood workshop — all historic buildings, lovingly cared for over the centuries...
As we contributed more, our experiences blossomed further.
We befriended Kuro, the farm dog, by pulling down fresh persimmons and tossing them straight into his mouth, and we dined together over food we sourced from neighboring farmers and took all day to prepare. We shared personal films and stories, wrote out our feelings, and took photos. We celebrated three birthdays in one night, then partied to a back2back DJ set with Mimi Zhu, Miles Lawton (DJ Lawson), and Matthew Bentley (063N13) at the Mother House — inspiring a surprise performance by resident artist Ho Wong. We met an eighth-generation Koji maker and witnessed an annual blessing event for knife-makers who come from a line of blacksmiths that once outfitted samurai. We hiked Mt. Kurakakeyama’s north face and helped each other down its rocky cliffs in the dark. We touched moss at the moss garden and felt the rain on our faces at an onsen nestled between a hillside and a raging river.
We didn’t create a pressure to sum up all of the above into an output, a final product — we didn’t set out to form that kind of artist residency. But through Mimi Zhu’s guidance, we wanted to create an intimate connection to the land by embodying a deep presence. One which embraces symbiosis with one another, with nature; to connect to a place and collect memories we can draw inspiration from forever.
