Those Beneath the Grass
Takuya Watanabe

Those Beneath the Grass is a video work which formed part of an installation by Takuya Watanabe. The film explores the entangled histories and relationships between humans and plants, through the repetitive labor of grass cutting. In the depopulated village of Ohara (Fukui Prefecture, Japan) only one elderly resident remains – Masao. The landscape, once shaped by human habitation, is now steadily being reclaimed by thriving vegetation – yet he continues to mow the grass each day.

As the camera turns to the ground beneath our feet, a quiet diversity of plant life is revealed. By tracing their origins, the work uncovers narratives of global trade, rural-urban imbalance, and the reciprocal ties between people and plants. The mowed paths become “contact zones” – spaces where human and plant life intersect and influence one another. In attending closely to the grass, it gradually reveals how these interspecies entanglements reach into broader social structures.

“At first glance, the plant community we witness seems to have been devastated by Masao’s mowing,” Watanabe told us. “Yet if he were to leave the village and human intervention ceased, the smaller plants here would soon lose their ground to larger ones. In other words, whether mowing is seen as positive or negative depends on which fragment of the whole one chooses to crop, and any such judgment remains uncertain.”