Yasuhiro Morinaga's sound installation 'Auto-ethnography: HAMAKAI' (2026) is on view at NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo as part of 'ICC Annual 2026: What Is Left, What Remains, and What We Take on', which continues until 8 November 2026. ICC has also released an interview with the artist about the work as a podcast on its YouTube channel and on Channel ICC.
The piece is an immersive installation built with spatial audio technology. Its title refers to hamakai, a form of vocal communication that imitates the sounds of prey animals during hunts in the forest, used by the Awá, described by ICC as the last nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Amazon. Morinaga has made several fieldwork trips to the region in recent years and recorded hamakai there, together with the sounds that now surround the Awá: illegal logging and a nearby railway that carries raw materials for steelmaking.
The work is also designed to let the artist, who approaches his subject through participant observation in the manner of cultural anthropology, look at himself from the outside. It is framed throughout by a conversation in a living room between a father, voiced by Morinaga, and his daughter, voiced by Yuna Ueda. The format borrows from the 'metalogue', a dialogue-based form devised by Gregory Bateson: the father eagerly shares what he has learned in the field while the daughter discovers the unknown, and at the end she raises a fundamental question about participant observation itself.
According to ICC, the installation uses theatrical techniques to bring into a single auditory space questions about preserving other cultures, about scientific research methods and about the urgent problems of environmental and cultural extinction.
