Speculative Installation, 2025

 

Institute of How to Disappear (I.H.D) is a fictional disappearance facility built inside a vacant office complex. The work imagines what it would mean for absence to have its own bureaucracy. The project constructs the full visual and operational identity of the institute, including uniforms, ID systems, stamps, note books, pens, printed forms, manuals, receipts, directional signage, intake desks, waiting areas, and disappearance rooms. Each object is designed and fabricated like it belonged to a functioning administrative space, allowing the institution to feel ordinary and precise, even when its purpose is not.

 

The project began with an interest in Jōhatsu, the phenomenon in Japan where people vanish from their lives without explanation. What stayed with me was not the disappearance itself, but the systems that struggle to acknowledge it. IHD imagines a world where this uncertainty is replaced by procedure. The act of vanishing becomes something that can be filed, requested, or approved. Visitors move through neutral rooms, clipped forms, and coded symbols, encountering a place that handles absence with the same calm efficiency normally reserved for routine civic matters.

 

I built every part of the environment, from the visual language to its printed documents and spatial layout, to consider how institutions define the limits of a person’s existence. When disappearance becomes an administrative category, it stops being a private choice and turns into a question of classification. The work reflects on how much of a life is held together by recognition, records, and repetition, and how the withdrawal of these structures can feel more decisive than the physical act of leaving.

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