Ryo Fujimoto

Ritual / Voice / Body / Beat / Sound & Video Artist

 

Born in Kobe, Japan (1987)

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Ryo Fujimoto’s creative practice always begins with the body. At the age of fourteen, following the sudden death of his father, he began practicing human beatboxing as a way to affirm his own existence. The primal vibrations of the beats he generated became the foundation of his artistic practice.

 

Fujimoto later became the only Japanese artist signed to a major European beatbox agency, touring forty cities across ten countries and performing at the Human Beatbox Convention (London) and the World Beatbox Championship (Berlin). His hybrid project Humanelectro, merging raw vocality with live electronics, gained international attention from Ableton Live, Gizmodo, and CoDesign (NY), leading to on-stage collaborations with Grammy-winning musicians including Robert Glasper and Bill Summers.

 

In 2015, his direct encounter with violence and undeniable discrimination in the Israel–Palestine region shattered the very foundation of his creative practice, which he had until then taken for granted: “Why make sound?” “Why express oneself?” What remained was breath for survival and voice as a signal of existence.

 

For nearly a decade, he he largely stepped back from major stages, exploring his relationship to voice, body, silence, electronics, video, and machines, and rebuilding his own mode of expression.

 

In 2024, he resumed full-scale artistic activity. He now works at the intersection of voice and body, combining electronics, video, and machines, searching for the moment when sound and movement rise up out of the body itself.

 

For Fujimoto, ritual establishes the conditions within which creation takes place. It is at once preparation, space, time, and method. Its fundamental structure remains intact, though interactions with machines and the surrounding environment may bring about subtle changes. His practice moves among four states:

 

• Wild Voice  (primal / wild)

• Beat (animal–human hybrid)

• Song (human)

• Electronics (non-human / material)

 

These are not discrete, separate genres. Within the body, they collide, overlap, and transform one another, shifting continuously between states. Machines and technologies are not merely tools under his control. He also encounters them as others, whose responses affect him in return and shape the unfolding performance.

 

The question he continues to explore is:  "What does it mean to live?"