Aki Sasamoto’s Movie: Squirrel Ways, 2025 is a video of an installation and performance piece that reimagines the structure of a living space. As a performance installation, it was developed during Sasamoto’s residency at the Atelier Calder, and presented at the Kunsthall Rotterdam and the Aichi Triennale in 2022, and at Arts and Letters, NYC in 2023. The work features an arrangement of modular shutters, doors, and translucent mulberry-papered sliding panels. These elements exist in a liminal state—somewhere between room dividers, walls, and doorways—allowing glimpses of brightly coloured personal items stored behind them. Suspended above the installation, a clothesline displays freshly washed garments, reinforcing themes of domesticity as well as transition, renewal and cyclical change.

Through a series of unscripted interactions with the environment and objects, Sasamoto playfully explores the fluid nature of boundaries and transformation. She examines the shifting states of objects and spaces: When does an exterior become an interior? How long does it take for clothes to become dirty? When does fish become my dinner? When does death start and when do we start living? These seemingly simple questions belie the existential complexity of the problems they address. Nothing is fixed, and yet we see in these actions and words just how ambiguous such changes can be. All of life, in its broadest sense, is played out in the domestic spaces of our own experience. With both humour and a heavy sense of pathos, she engages directly with the structure, converting its sliding screens into canvases for impromptu drawings or turning concealed compartments into sites of discovery, revealing everyday objects like fishing lures, rulers, and sponges. By embracing movement and uncertainty, Sasamoto invites viewers to consider the complexities of thresholds and the ever-changing nature of our surroundings. By occupying such liminality, she highlights the interconnected nature of language and physical gesture in our ability to understand.