Temporary Pact

Sapporo is among the world’s snowiest metropolises, enduring approximately five meters of snowfall annually.

Rather than resisting the climate, the city has adapted through an extensive underground network linking its main hubs. Above ground, however, winter reconfigures the landscape into new volumes that swallow pavements, alleys, and parks. Daily life proceeds by accepting these temporary masses and waiting for the snow to give back what belongs to the city once it melts.

This interactive installation explores the unwritten social contract between Sapporo’s inhabitants and the winter. Visitors enter a fragile agreement of coexistence where every interaction leaves a spatial, visual, and temporal mark. Here, snow is not a passive backdrop but an organism with memory and a finite margin of tolerance. Every gesture negotiates that limit: the digital snowfield absorbs, resists, and slowly erases traces, mirroring how Sapporo’s streets record and eventually release the pressure of human movement.

The project was developed in collaboration with Toshihiko Shibuya, whose Snow Pallet works use the accumulation of real snow as both land art and environmental register: fluorescent under-surfaces tint the reflected light so that subtle colour shifts become a living diagram of climate and warming over time. While Shibuya’s work records nature’s agency, this installation shifts the agent and the scale: it is no longer the climate that acts on the pallet, but the human body that acts on the snow. The pallet becomes a field of social negotiation rather than a climatic archive: the same surface, a different kind of memory