Letters or gifts carry with them a hint of the sender’s presence like a lingering scent. By receiving them, we can perceive the traces of the sender without meeting her/him in person. “Fermented Trunk Box” is a relay-style mail art that was initiated in order to revive the experience brought about by this kind of “sending” and “receiving”.

Teams of five people relay the boxes containing various art supplies such as drawing paper and pipe cleaner, and each member successively contributes to create a collage on a single base sheet. Just as vegetables pickled in a bed of rice bran are fermented by microorganisms, we believe that the memories and ideas that each of us has can produce unexpected changes by using a single box as a medium.
We have put all the instructions for volunteers who took part in the project on the web site “note”.
Detailed instructions and other information can be found there too.