(Italy)
Marta Fumagalli and Riccardo Pirovano work together as visual artist since 2011 under the name Jukai. From Europe, to Japan and Africa Jukai has been creating site-specific installations sprouted from the observation and the interaction with those sites. The word ‘jukai’ is the transliteration of what in Japanese culture is defined as ‘the sea of trees’, or the deep, primordial, uncontaminated forest attributed to the famous coniferous forest at the foot of Japanese Mount Fuji.
Jukai’s investigation focuses on urban landscape as a complex ecosystem in which vegetation, humans and animals coexist in a precarious balance. Jukai interests are the processes of transformation that pass through the most neglected places in the city, i.e. 'landscape waste' that become for Jukai precious raw material from which to trigger a new creative process. Its practice is inspired by nature's 'waste-free' economy, where the waste of one process always becomes raw material for something else.