Being Keepers: Line Language as Survival Methodology - Ryoko Kose

[Tammy Wong Hulbert]

Dear AN4AA members,

Please join us to celebrate the work of Ryoko Kose at RMIT Site 8, Building 2, Level 1, opening on Thursday 4 June 5:00-7:00pm. Ryoko Kose is a completing practice-led PhD Candidate in the RMIT School of Art, Melbourne.

Being Keepers: Line Language as Survival Methodology


古瀬了子/Ryoko Kose

Opening：Thurs 4th June 5-7pm

Open to Public: Thu 4th 10am to 7pm, Fri 5th 10am to 1pm




This practice-led research began with a rupture: the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, which shattered environment, society, and language simultaneously, rendering conventional modes of articulation inadequate. What followed was over a decade of inhabiting the Unspeakable.

At the core of this inquiry is the life force: the autonomous, pulsating energy preceding institutional validation. Central to the research is Line Language—a pre-verbal grammar from Ikebana and Japanese vernacular knowledge, grounded in Ma (間): the breathable interval at the heart of being. Under the systemic pressure of Unspeakability, this grammar was recalibrated into a Survival Methodology: a way to remain-with harm, to keep existing where the system would erase. Through this practice, the research weaves Kekkai（結界）: imaginative clearings where Ma opens across space, time, and the inner self—and the life force can breathe, honest, unruly, and alive within the conditions of harm.

This methodology emerges in response to the 'violence of proof'—the systemic demand that pain be translated into data and existence be justified by institutional utility and legibility. Grounded in Guattari's ecosophy and Saito's aesthetics of care, it reimagines activism as being rather than doing. For those whose existence is not recognised by institutional structures, to remain is itself an act of resistance. For a Being Keeper navigating invisible contamination, precarious migration, and the labour of motherhood, surviving, caring, creating, researching, and maintaining cultural ontologies are synonymous acts of refusal. The research proposes Creative Proofing: polyphonic evidence of existence through fragments, gestures, and somatic traces—a transferable framework for any marginalised subject whose reality resists quantification.

To weave one's own Kekkai is the most fundamental form of activism: a Being Keeper's quiet custodianship of a sanctuary where the life force exists unobserved—stubborn, relational, agentic, and filled with a quiet, secret joy.

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Tammy Wong Hulbert

Mob: +61 411 894 331