Kleroterion is inspired by the pachinko chapter of Roland Barthes’ The Empire of Signs (1970), in which Barthes compares factory assembly lines with people playing pachinko in Japan. These entangled relationships between labour, capitalism and play became the starting point for this project.

In 2020, I stayed in an artist residency on top of a pachinko parlour called Rakuen on the outskirts of Tokyo. Immersed in the overwhelming soundscape and kaleidoscopic visuals of the machines, I began filming the people and machinery within this environment.

Ironically, unable to afford to process the film for five years after the shoot, my research led me towards the history of pachinko and its relationship to Zainichi Korean communities, for whom the industry became an important source of livelihood amid the racial and institutional discrimination they faced in postwar Japan.

This history made me think about the divisions that continue to shape contemporary society, both in Japan and the West. As class divisions deepen and xenophobic and far-right politics gain visibility, differences in social, cultural and economic circumstances can become increasingly difficult to see from one another’s perspective. For many working people, time for rest and leisure is also increasingly limited.

An interview with the manager of Rakuen in 2020 unexpectedly echoed these concerns. Speaking about learning new ways to run the business, he said, “I need to see outside more.” His words stayed with me. They made me think about the difficulty of looking beyond the systems and environments we are already inside, something that feels increasingly amplified by the internet.

In Kleroterion, the pachinko parlour becomes a microcosm in which work, leisure, chance and capital collide. The title refers to the ancient Athenian allotment machine used to randomly select citizens for civic duties. By placing this mechanism of democracy alongside the machinery of pachinko, the film asks what happens when chance, participation and systems of control become entangled, and what might be required to see beyond our own position.