Japan Becomes Switzerland marks the site of a transubstantiation. In a small village in the Swiss Alps, I buried 100 grams of brewed Japanese green tea leaves in a hand-dug hole, covering them with alpine soil. What began as agricultural matter grown in Japan entered a new cycle of decomposition, enmeshing with the geologic and microbial systems of Switzerland. The act is simple, one sachet, one hole, but the implication is infrastructural: this is place reconfigured through the conveyance of latent materials and the quiet geochemical negotiation of decay. From that moment forward, this expression of Japan began to become Switzerland, not symbolically, but materially.
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DATE: 2018
MATERIALS: Japanese green tea, Swiss Alps
SCALE: small scale earthwork
DIMENSIONS: 100 grams
SITE: Switzerland
STATUS: complete
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Material Grounds, USC Landscape Architecture (2.25.2021).