With two Tadashi Kawamata’s projects realised in Japan, this paper focuses on the importance of the work in progress as a way to act within a community involved in the process. The industrial and urban context of those projects : an ancient coalmine in Kyushu and the city of Toyota where Toyota Motor Corporation has his headquarters, is part of the project as elements of the cultural, and social history and of his critics regarding the modernity in Japan. Kawamata’s doubts about modernity are together with his way to put into question the status of art, of the work of art, of the artist and of the co-called public. The potentialities here concern the way to project a personal and collective future with the memory of the coalmine, and the way to be involved in the definition and daily uses of the common space and the way to be part of a community.