The project portraits the lives of economically vulnerable and socially invisible workers in Japan, revealing how financial instability can turn ordinary spaces into places of long-term residence.
Photo credits: Shiho Fukada / Panos Pictures.
Internet Cafe Refugees
Tommaso Capobianco Ettore Della Marina Jan Kacer
Student
Tommaso Capobianco Ettore Della Marina Jan Kacer Academic staff
Davide Ferrando Course
The Media Bedroom The exhibition takes its inspiration from Shiho Fukada’s documentary Disposable Workers, which explores the plight of Internet Café Refugees in Japan: precarious workers who, unable to afford a home, live for long periods in internet cafés open 24 hours a day. These spaces, equipped with private booths and essential facilities, become temporary shelters for people excluded from the housing market and from adequate forms of social support. The installation recreates a sectioned-off internet café room, laid bare for the visitor to see, highlighting the cramped space and the loss of privacy. Inside the booth, a screen is the only link to the outside world. This screen plays the documentary Internet Café Refugees throughout the exhibition, offering a direct insight into the protagonists’ stories and inviting reflection on the relationship between work, housing and precariousness in contemporary society.
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Our project recreates a sectioned net café room, allowing visitors to look inside and observe the living conditions of Internet Café Refugees. From the outside, the installation resembles a large shipping crate, its raw structure contrasts with the space inside, revealing the limited conditions and everyday reality of those who rely on these environments as homes.
A project made in the course
The Media Bedroom
The Media Bedroom is a bachelor-level course in Interior & Exhibit Design that introduces students to the fundamental principles of exhibition design through the critical investigation of the bedroom as a post-domestic space. Drawing on Paul B. Preciado’s notion of post-domesticity, the course approaches the bed not as an intimate, isolated object, but as a media-saturated device—an infrastructural node where bodies, images, data, labor, and desire converge. Once understood as the ultimate site of privacy, the bedroom today is continuously perforated by communication technologies that transform it into a stage, a studio, a workplace, and a broadcast interface.
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