Yuri Suzuki: UTOOTO
Until 5 October 2025
Camden Arts Projects
176 Prince of Wales Road
London, NW5 3PT
Yuri Suzuki’s playful, visually striking exhibition at Camden Arts Projects imagines a utopia without borders, inviting visitors to construct a sonic city together.
At Camden Arts Projects in London, the exhibition space is filled not with bricks or blueprints but with sound, as visitors are invited to assemble a city.
UTOOTO, part of Yuri Suzuki’s playful and visually striking exhibition running until 5 October, is an interactive installation where participants collaboratively construct what the artist calls “a sonic architecture—a utopian city.” Each visitor builds a small structure, forming devices that communicate not through words but through sound.
Credit Chris Kidall Park
Suzuki frames the project as a response to today’s climate of division. It imagines a utopia without borders—an environment where people build, play and connect through shared sonic experience. “At a time of growing social division and isolation, experiences that bring people together, encourage communication, and foster community feel more vital than ever,” the exhibition notes.
The work produces a continuously evolving soundscape made from layered human voices: a choir of vowels and consonants spoken in many languages. These fragmented phonemes do not foreground difference, but instead reveal the subtle similarities that cross linguistic boundaries—what Suzuki describes as a sonic common ground.
Play is central to the experience. Children and adults alike are invited to use pipes, horns and simple tools to construct and reconfigure the pavilion’s framework, shaping pathways for sound to travel and echo. It is, as Suzuki suggests, “the kind of hands-on experience that we hope resonates with families and sparks creativity across generations.”
Credit Chris Kidall Park
The name UTOOTO carries layered meanings. It recalls both the drowsy drift of dozing off—a liminal state between wakefulness and sleep—and the Okinawan phrase utouto, used in prayer. It hovers between reverence and play, encouraging reflection as well as participation.
Conceptually, the work also draws inspiration from utopian architectural projects, particularly Walt Disney’s original plan for EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). EPCOT was imagined not as a theme park but as a real, functioning city where innovation and collaboration might shape a better future. In the same spirit, UTOOTO offers prototypes of a utopia—not built from concrete or steel, but from sound, structure and collective imagination.
Yuri Suzuki: UTOOTO Until 5 October 2025 Camden Arts Projects
©2025 Yuri Suzuki
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