Parallel Mutant Family

Parallel Mutant Family visualizes the mutation of human perception through physical collages of family archives. By stitching daily photos, subconscious memories become tactile objects. It explores the cycle of transcending internal frameworks.

Parallel Mutant Family is a project that visualizes the structures of perception formed within the human unconscious and their processes of mutation, rooted in our ongoing exploration of the inseparability of life and expression. Positioned as an extension of previous works such as Parallel World Family, this project employs the deeply personal relationship of family to illuminate universal inner psychological structures shared by human beings.

Drawing from a vast accumulation of everyday family records, the work takes the form of physical collages constructed through cutting, stitching, and layering photographs. This process does not simply reorganize documentation. Here, photographs are reinterpreted as traces of consciousness—fragments of memory unconsciously stored and recalled. By physically layering these fragments, the work exposes the strata of perception that shape individual existence, transforming unstable and ambiguous inner structures into tangible, touchable objects.

The silver frames surrounding the works appear at first glance to be solid metal, yet they are in fact fragile structures made of plaster clay. This perceptual discrepancy symbolizes how concepts formed through everyday experience—such as the assumption that “silver equals metal”—govern and condition our ways of seeing. These conceptual frameworks are constructions established for our understanding and assignment of meaning to the world, yet their very essence remains in a state of constant flux.

These frameworks are not fixed truths. They continually mutate in response to circumstance and survival instinct, and their accumulation shapes an individual’s personality and worldview. The act of stitching photographic fragments with thread is a bodily process of thinking and experience, through which new relationships emerge between fragmented memories. It is an engagement with inner structures that are constantly being updated and reconfigured.

Parallel Mutant Family visualizes the continuous process in which perceptual frameworks appear, collapse, mutate, and are reconstructed. Human beings always live within frames of recognition, yet through experience and thought they cross these boundaries, only to encounter new frames that must again be traversed. This endless repetition of renewal constitutes the fundamental activity of life itself.

The practice of Fujimura Family inherits the lineage of personal and family photography, while expanding it into an experimental field that explores mutation in life and the boundaries of existence. By integrating the destabilized “reality” shaped by contemporary technologies—including AI—into the level of everyday life, and regenerating memories at the intersection of the digital and the analog as physical objects, this project reexamines the fundamental function of photography and proposes a new ontological practice in the post-photographic era.