Rolling Landscape 2025_Chiba City is an art project that aims to make visible, share, and preserve the invisible memories that accumulate in the city every day. Although cities are places that are constantly changing, the residents and substances there bear traces of time. This work attempts to reconsider the relationship between cities and individuals by looking at the memories and questions buried under that daily life.

Underlying the work is an interest in the structure where changing and fixed memories in the city intersect. A multilayered urban landscape is formed by the temporary traces of people who visit and leave Chiba every day for sightseeing or transporting goods, and the memories of long-term residents.

The area around Chiba Station, the setting for the work, is a node connecting the Boso Peninsula and the Tokyo area, and a place where different kinds of people come and go. As people from diverse backgrounds, including essential workers, visit each day, the countless vestiges of their movements and existences accumulate in layers over the cityscape. The project focuses on the fluidity of the city and the individual traces that lie under the surface.

At the core of the project is artist Yohei Chimura’s act of moving through the urban space around Chiba Station while rolling a glass tire. A small camera attached to the tire shaft records the scenery through the glass, and the images reveal a distorted reflection of the cityscape. The glass used to create the tire comes in part from dust collected from roads around the station in cooperation with locals. It forms an attempt to make visible the tiny traces of the city that amass daily in this key transportation hub.

In the exhibition, the glass tire will be shown alongside footage of the landscape. The traces of abrasion etched into the glass of the tire seem to mirror the distorted landscape captured in the footage, giving viewers a sense of newly perceiving the city on a different level. The essence of this work lies not in trying to solve social issues directly, but rather in taking up the questions hidden under everyday life and triggering realizations and dialogue among viewers.

As part of the local research, Chimura also plans to make another glass tire with sand collected from the shoes of elementary school students in the city. During the exhibition, visitors will be able to freely roll this tire around the city, providing a place where to experience new connections with the local environment and memories.

[Types of citizen involvement] Collecting materials, Rolling the tire