The project considers how everyday urban life plays out in the presence of Tokyo’s earthquake fault lines. Issui is the founder of the ambitious real-life business collective ‘Sampo’ which creates mobile living units for the Japanese market. Sampo acts as a driver for the film, becoming a fictional space where ideas of co-living, disaster preparation, and manifestation of the past are explored.

‘Ephemeral Preservation’ depicts the world of Sampo through the deployment of a series of interventions that operate on a variety of scales. From the ‘Tact’ mobile expandable kit to the ‘MoC’ mobile cell, and the Kura Storehouse to the Mikoshi, each one resists the idea of ‘fixity’, drawing on the idea of the void space and historic Japanese architectural modes.

Influenced by slacker culture and Mike Figgis’ Timecode (2000) the film is realised as a lo-fi, counter-cultural rallying cry, where the collective acts of making, gathering, building, remembering (and partying) try to flow with the natural world, rather than creating resistive structures. The film is part-documentary, part-music video; a bespoke freestyle rap drives the form of the film. The central content is the optimistic attitude and approach of the community, rather than built hardware. A new kind of anticipatory, participatory, free-flowing architecture.