When we live alone / Locuind singuri + Butohouse

When we live alone

When We Live Alone explores the ways in which we live alone together in contemporary cities. The unprecedented rise of urban dwellers living on their own challenges normative ideas about home and raises questions about how this change in social structure and lifestyle affects cities as a whole. While the causes of living alone seem apparent—shifting social values, the flexibilization of labour, new demographics, increased wealth, and changes to normative gender roles—the effects on society and its spatial configurations remain uncertain. Through a series of interconnected vignettes, the film interrogates this new urban condition, offering glimpses into the lives of individuals inhabiting singleton homes and the extended domestic sphere. Urban dwellers living on their own, architect Takahashi Ippei, and sociologist Yoshikazu Nango navigate the audience through a series of sole spaces in Tokyo. If living alone is our new reality, the film asks what does it look like?

Butohouse

A documentary film by architectural artists and filmmakers Beka & Lemoine tells a story of perseverance and hope through the work of Keisuke Oka, who expresses his resistance to the infernal machinery of the Tokyo metropolis in the form of a house. Trained in butoh dance, an avantgarde choreographic movement born in Japan in the 1960s, Oka makes architecture a performance, one that reflects his own struggles as an architect. His ongoing improvisation has garnered recognition from cultural figures in Japan who commend his rebellious and unconventional approach to building.