An Afternoon at Skwat Kameari Art Centre

Kameari is not a part of Tokyo you might immediately be familiar with. It’s a low-key, local kind of place in the suburban outskirts north east of the city. It’s not too showy or loud, and not historically been much of a cultural hub. It is a neighbourhood best known, if it's known at all, for a bronze statue of a beloved manga policeman outside the station.

So it is not, by any conventional metric, where you'd expect to find one of the city's more quietly influential new creative projects. That was until Skwat Kameari Art Centre opened in 2024. Skwat is in some senses as low key as the area it’s in. Hidden away under a railway line, on an unassuming street, a fifteen minute walk from Kameari Station. It doesn’t announce itself with the bombast of a Frank Gehry or Herzog & de Meuron — as many regenerative brand new cultural centres — but when you enter Skwat Kameari, it opens up like a MC Esher illustration into a maze of improbable, creative proportions.

Skwat Kameari is the brainchild of Keisuke Nakamura and a group of close friends and collaborators. It contains a bookshop, record store, cafe, and exhibition space.

It is the fourth, and most complete iteration of a project that traces its roots back to Vacant, a space in Harajuku that opened in 2009 to host exhibitions and events, performances and gigs and all manner of underground cultural happenings. Around this time, Nakamura had returned to Japan from studying in London, and became involved in Vacant. Work that grew into, in 2011, into Daikei Mills, his architecture and design office, who over the years have worked on commercial projects for the likes of Issey Miyake, Kolor, Bang and Olufsen and Auralee. But his work with Skwat is something different, bigger and deeper.

The first Skwat project was housed in an abandoned, bright-blue-painted launderette, also in Harajuku, and opened in 2019 after Vacant had closed. It was run with Twelvebooks, who also run the Tokyo Art Book Fair, the largest event of its kind in Asia. That collaboration then led to a second temporary space, in Minami-Aoyama, and has continued now to the Skwat site in Kameari, which feels the most fully fledged iteration, and potentially even permanent.

“What these projects all have in common is the underlying premise that a creative approach can bring about a transformation in the value of a place,” Nakamura says, as he welcomes us into Skwat. He had heard about squatting in London, and became fascinated with the practice, finding inspiration in the idea of transforming empty buildings into places to live or work or create, spaces economically tailored for alternative and fringe creative processes that could exist outside the mainstream.

Nakamura’s philosophy, which underpins Skwat Kameari, is that a different kind of relationship with space — and thus the economics of creative life — is possible. Especially in a city like Tokyo, with its relentless appetite for demolition and rebuilding, and commercial opportunity. He describes it succinctly as one interested in the “transformation in the value of a space.”

“Owning a space and bringing it to life within society is, above all else, the most effective way to give tangible form to my own views and messages,” he continues. “And is the most persuasive approach. I don’t regard this as anything out of the ordinary, I see it as the responsibility of anyone who creates things and brings them into the world.”

The main feeling, when entering Skwat, is how open and collaborative it feels. Partly this is as a result of Nakamura’s design decisions. Skwat is large and labyrinthine, but not monolithic or imposing. It doesn’t demand much of you, you are as welcome to come for a coffee and to relax, as you are to spend a few hours browsing their collection of art books or rare records. Its aesthetic is inspired partly by an interest in the possibility and potential contained within something a little unfinished, and the practical needs of a space constantly in progress and movement.

Exposed steel, plywood furniture, and unfinished surfaces can be read either as philosophical statements or practical shortcuts to create a structure within a potentially temporary space. But it’s also neither one or the other. “It embodies both,” Nakamura says. “We believe that the grey areas created by removing the boundaries of a space give rise to freedom and creativity.” There’s something both unfinished in the materiality of the space, but also quite structured and present. And it's this exposing of the raw materials and structure of the space, rather than disguising it — showing the working, leaving room and leaving things open — that is part of their ideal of finding beauty in the forgotten areas of the city.

The programming follows the same logic. Books, records, coffee and art are all presented as a single, continuous experience rather than discrete offerings. “It was necessary to create a space where people could engage in the very fundamental everyday experiences of reading, listening and drinking,” Nakamura says. “However, all of these experiences are intrinsically linked to art.”

There’s a nice irony though, their rejection of normal ways of doing things has led to Skwat becoming a hit, both with locals and as a hub for international guests. Skwat has put Kameari on the map, an off the beaten track destination for lovers of art and design and everything in between. Despite being both a book shop and a record store, it’s really a social place.

When we arrive, the space is home to what they’ve called the Skwat Hertz Orchestra — two pianos set up in the exhibition space and open to anyone to play. All performances, whether from members of the public or musicians they’ve invited, are recorded, and broadcast as the soundtrack to the rest of the space.

They’ve also played host to a diverse range of creative practitioners for other exhibitions. Hosting a retrospective exhibition of books by Wolfgang Tillmans, for example, another artist who, like Skwat, is interested in humanity in all its facets, and finding beauty in unexpected places, as well as other designers like Claire Renard and Jean-Sébastien Blanc, who presented a display of repurposed chairs gathered from French second-hand platform, leboncoin. Rem Koolhaas's architectural practice OMA used the space to launch a repressing of their landmark book, Tokyo Generic City, and Korean designer Kwango Lee staged an exhibition there, titled Ghost in the Shell, presented a selection of his signature, boisterous industrial weaving works.

As our tour comes to an end, Nakamura mentions, almost in passing, that Skwat will nearly double in size within the year, spreading further along and under the tracks. That’s the intention at least, to be perpetually unfinished, in progress. Outside the sun sets down the street, and a couple, almost too poetically, sit down at the pianos in the exhibition space and start playing, unrehearsed, and like Keisuke Nakamura, creating something beautiful out of nothing.