This project was developed during a residency at AIR 3331 Iwamotocho Studio in November 2025. The work follows a two-month pilgrimage through Japan, during which the many experiences I encountered led me to reflect on the different bodily postures I adopted within Japanese public space.

The project stems from a personal fascination with the experience of Japanese public baths and with baseball—its codes and, more specifically, one of its simplest and most symbolically charged forms: home plate, the pentagonal base located at the heart of the field.

I also became interested in the compositional structures of traditional Japanese woodblock prints, particularly the illustrations of The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), an eleventh-century literary work recounting life at the Japanese imperial court, which employ an isometric perspective. These images give a decisive role to diagonals, which structure space by opening it up and unfolding it laterally rather than in depth.

Repeated from one plane to the next, these diagonals function as vectors that guide the viewer’s gaze, spreading the composition across a continuous space without hierarchy or a central vanishing point. I observed a strong formal relationship between this logic and the house-like shape of home plate, whose oblique angles likewise generate orientation and spatial tension. In both cases, the diagonal does not serve to dramatize the scene, but rather to stabilize an extended, rhythmic, and legible spatiality, in which space is constructed through repetition and slippage.

Home plate embodies the idea of home: return, departure, and arrival. It anchors the playing field as a symbolic cell, a point of orientation. Through this project, I seek to explore how this geometric form can resonate with broader notions such as home, mental territory, and narrative space.

In resonance with my experience of traveling in Japan, I also reflect on bodily proximity, intimate space, and modesty within the culture of communal bathing (onsen and sentō), as well as on the ways in which one cohabits with the space of others.

Between baseball’s home plate (a site of collective exaltation) and the baths (spaces of ritualized relaxation), intimacy has little room. The body is public, and the boundaries of intimacy are strictly regulated by adherence to social conventions.

The installation extends through the presence of a home plate composed of a stacked arrangement of towels. In Japanese baths, the bath towel constitutes the final boundary of intimacy: it marks the symbolic limit between complete nudity, which is socially accepted, and what remains within the realm of the private.