Yukikaki Research Station

Yukikaki Research Station (YRS) was built together with Niklas during a research residency of the Sapporo International Art Festival (SIAF2020). Originally, our plan was to make an outdoor installation in which snow and ice would play a central role, as Sapporo is well-known for amazing winters. The festival theme Of Roots and Clouds also served as our inspiration. However, when we arrived in Sapporo at the end of January 2020, there was hardly any snow. The situation was similar in Germany and other places, raising concerns over the warming winters. Thus, we adapted our concept to the ongoing situation and built Yukikaki Research Station (YRS), which re-purposes snow shoveling tools as wind turbines. The research station data can be also observed via smartphone. In 2025, YRS was shown outdoors at the Sapporo Snow Festival as a part of the SIAF Pre-Events program.

At the beginning of our residency we visited the local hardware stores to explore materials and discovered an impressive array of colorful snow equipment. The Japanese expression yukikaki means both, the act of snow shoveling, as well as the snow shovels used for it. Due to the high snowfall in Sapporo during the winter season, people living in the city are used to engage in various forms of yukikaki. Faced with the situation of scarce snow our question was, what would happen to all these tools when snow became rare? We bought different types of yukikaki and other snow equipment and started to explore how to use them in unintended ways.

The outcome of our residency, Yukikaki Research Station, repurposes yukikaki and other snow gear as experimental wind turbines. It explores how yukikakis of different shapes behave as turbines by measuring their rotation speed via magnetic sensors. A microcontroller stores the values over time, allowing people to view the data through a mobile interface. In the video above you can see YRS inside the Tenjinyama Art Studio, where we built it.

During the residency it also started eventually to snow, so we got to see how the yukikaki tools were actually used daily as a necessity to cope with large amounts of snow. Coming from Finland and spending my childhood playing with snow, it was very interesting to see the very sophisticated snow management systems in Sapporo.

Like so many other cultural events, SIAF2020 was unfortunately cancelled due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and we could not present Yukikaki Research Station as planned outside, in the Sapporo Art Park. Instead, the artworks were presented in the online archive called SIAF2020 Matrix and YRS was also shown at the SIAF2020 Document exhibition at the Sapporo Cultural Community Center in February 2021.

Eventually, in February 2025, we were delighted to have the chance to show YRS outdoors as a part of the SIAF Pre-Events program at the Sapporo Snow Festival. Having this opportunity to show the installation amongst the amazing snow sculptures was truly great and we were also very happy to re-connect with the dear SIAF colleagues.

See also:

• Photo album of SIAF 2020 residency
• Photo album of YRS at Snow Festival 2025
• Documentation on Niklas' website