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Paper short abstract:

Tracing the narrative of socio-ecological resilience constructed by a regional regeneration art project, my paper considers how leveraging cultural frameworks to imagine sustainable futures also imagines a selective past, and whether this practice ideates a collective identity in post-growth Japan.

Paper long abstract:

Dispersed over 200 hamlets in Niigata prefecture, Echigo-Tsumari Art Field (ETAF) represents an innovative network of cultural institutions that collaborate with local people to fill farmland, unused homes and closed schools with art and cultural activity. This is one example of a growing number of regional regeneration "art projects" in post-growth Japan, meant to foster sustainable community development in the face of depopulation and rural-to-urban migration, which increasingly jeopardizes the conservation of cultural and natural heritage in peripheral localities. Drawing selectively from this rural heritage, ETAF designates an entire 760m2 region as its "museum"—a realm in which to imagine and model a future when, once again, "human beings are part of nature". This paper contextualizes such institutional narrative through a museological perspective by first, demonstrating how ETAF ideates and enacts heritage towards the reification of regional identity; and second, considering how this practice relates to national narratives of socio-ecological resilience. Ultimately, this paper questions how, in the process of leveraging cultural frameworks to imagine ecological futures, the past is also imagined.

Embarking from ETAF's own institutional assertions—that "all of 'satoyama' [village mountain] is an art museum" and that "human beings are part of nature"—I employ a grounded theory approach in two key stages: an autoethnography and content analysis of interpretive materials gathered during participation in the 2018 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale. I demonstrate how ETAF enacts the lore of local climate and topography ("Snow Country"), encultured concepts of nature (satoyama), agricultural histories and prehistories (Jōmon archaeology) to weave a narrative of continued survival, becoming an expressive metaphor for overcoming contemporary socio-economic hardship in the region through cultural resources. Through this narrative, the art project becomes a normative medium for communicating and fostering pride in regional ecological identity. At the same time, this narrative imagines an idealized rural Japan: Drawing from the nostalgia of a selective past, ETAF infers characteristics of the region and its residents towards much hoped-for cultural continuity. I contextualize these findings within the museological literature—chiefly, the theory of "imagined communities" and "invented traditions"—to discuss historiographical precedent and the directionality of power in institutional reproductions of rural Japan.