Between Abandonment and Reappropriation: Renegotiating with the Afterlives of Ruin Landscapes on the Islands of Naoshima, Teshima, and Inujima

Abstract

This thesis follows the afterlives of industrial and demographic ruination on the islands of Naoshima, Teshima, and Inujima in Japan's Seto Inland Sea, where abandoned structures and ruin landscapes have been drawn back into use through site specific art projects. Approaching these islands as patchy, haunted ruin landscapes shaped by overlapping histories of extraction, shrinkage, and more than human reoccupation, this thesis argues that maintenance work has become a central practice through which these places are reinhabited and folded into new arrangements of living. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on these islands during the Setouchi Triennale 2022, I follow maintenance work as a practice of ongoing (re)negotiation between abandonment and reappropriation, between human withdrawal and more than human activity, and between industrial pasts and curated and imagined futures. Across industrial slag landscapes, restored rice paddies, and repurposed akiya, I show how maintenance work engages with the shifting relations that constitute these landscapes, shaping their afterlives and the forms of habitability that persist within them at a time of rural shrinkage and the Anthropocene.