My Power (2024) documents a journey to a thermal power plant, captured through dark, grainy iPhone footage that preserves the raw immediacy of the moment. Unfolding as a silent narrative, the film removes all spoken dialogue, leaving only ambient field recordings to guide the viewer. The rhythm of these sounds - their pauses, fluctuations, and tonal shifts - creates a suggestive narrative in the absence of words, encouraging an experience led by sensation rather than explicit explanation.

The thermal power plant visited in the film - Hirono Thermal Power Station - supplies electricity to the eastern Japan region, particularly the Tokyo metropolitan area. After sustaining damage during the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, all units were temporarily shut down, but operations were later resumed following restoration efforts. However, due to aging infrastructure, Units 1, 3, and 4 were decommissioned in 2023, and only Units 2, 5, and 6 remain in operation today. My Power also serves as a personal record of the artist’s realization that the electricity they rely on in Tokyo originates from this very site.

The audio in the work is primarily composed of a single-take recording made with a handheld recorder, capturing fine details such as the texture of footsteps and the force of the wind. At certain moments, when the artist spontaneously recorded video using an iPhone, the work switches to the iPhone’s built-in audio. This shift foregrounds the artist’s belief that sound alone, even without accompanying images, can vividly convey material textures, environmental conditions, and unseen presences. The frustration with the dominance of the visual medium, and the desire to emphasize the independent richness of sound, becomes a structural part of the work.

A slow sense of anticipation builds as the power station gradually appears through the car’s windscreen - a destination both mundane and monumental. Dashboard indicators, fleeting road signs, and glimpses of data ground the journey in a specific time and place, while highlighting a meticulous focus on the task. Later, footsteps imprint into coastal sand near the plant, and stark artificial lights cast long shadows, hinting at the presence of the artist and their guide. Yet it is precisely in moments of human absence that My Power most clearly reveals its central tension: the profound relationship between the hidden infrastructure that sustains contemporary life and the societies that rarely acknowledge it. Through this absence, the work becomes a quiet critique. The infrastructure enabling daily life is often calculated and measured without direct reference to human voices or needs. By stripping away personal dialogue and privileging ambient sound, My Power subtly questions what remains unseen and unheard in the dominant narratives of progress. Initially recorded as a personal document rather than an artwork, the project acquires new meaning through its presentation—existing in the liminal space between individual experience and broader social issues.