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- Convenor:
-
John Williams
(Sophia University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Visual Arts
- Location:
- Auditorium 4 Jaap Kruithof
- Sessions:
- Sunday 20 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel offers a critical look at arts and regional revitalisation and between art and positive environmental practice in Japan. Two practitioners (a filmmaker and a visual artist) reflect on their own work with an academic (from Japan) involved in environmental conservation in a Tokyo park.
Long Abstract:
There has been an explosion of interest in Japan in the linkage between art in urban settings, art and regional revitalization and arts and the environment. Large-scale exhibitions in outdoor spaces, such as the Setouchi Triennale, Echigo Tsumari Festival and Galaxy Fest (Sado) have proliferated. In the theater arts, director and writer Hirata Oriza helped create a College of Arts and Tourism in Hyogo Prefecture, where he is launching an international theater festival. Regional filmmaking has been given a boost by government initiatives and subsidies. The new field of art and rural revitalization has also attracted academic study, including a two-day symposium in Tokyo at the DIJ (Art in the Countryside) in 2022.
Many regional initiatives focus on the economic impact of these events and see art as a way to attract tourists. The success or failure of projects is measured monetarily. Meanwhile policymakers often rely on artists as communicators of complex plans in information campaigns, while natural scientists and engineers hire graphic designers to package complex scientific data into easy-to-understand visual presentations. Planners also use art-focused projects as a policy tool to promote regional revitalization and tourism. Yet these utilitarian approaches can neglect, and at times hinder, art's potential to offer critical intervention into our understanding of humanity's relationship to nature and some Japanese artists and filmmakers' question the underlying assumptions behind these initiatives.
Art can promote greater community engagement and cultivate our capacity for creativity, innovation, and imagination. Such challenges from the world of art are essential in this era of climate crisis, which has required us to reorient our society and reimagine our place in nature. This panel offers a critical look at the relationship between arts and regional revitalization and between art practice and positive environmental practice in Japan. The panel is eclectic, with two practitioners (a filmmaker and a visual artist) reflecting on their own work and an academic (from Japan) involved in environmental conservation in a Tokyo park.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Sunday 20 August, 2023, -John Williams (Sophia University)
Paper short abstract:
With clips from a documentary and an experimental fictional feature film, using puppets and live actors, a filmmaker explores the relationship between filmmaking, the environment, culture and traditions of a remote fishing village on Sado Island.
Paper long abstract:
I have spent the last eight years documenting a small fishing village at the remote Western tip of Sado Island. With only forty residents, most of them in their eighties, the community is slowly heading towards collapse. But the village is rich in local knowledge about farming, fishing and the environment. Sustainability and even growth might be possible here, given a different trajectory or new way of thinking about regional viability. Whilst making the documentary, I began to explore how art could be used to preserve or even re-invent the village, possibly by creating a regular theater or performing arts festival there. But due to Covid this was not possible and in August 2022 I turned the theater piece into an experimental fiction film, based on local legends and stories and using Bunraku size puppets with live actors. (The area has a local puppetry tradition.) The resulting film is a kind of “scavenged” or “salvaged” film that attempts to express something of the spirit of the village and the area in a poetic form. I will show clips from the finished film and explore ideas from contemporary philosophy (Markus Gabriel and Alva Noe) whose ideas about the power of art to change thinking have influenced my own thinking as a filmmaker. Is there a model here for a different kind of filmmaking practice, more rooted in place and growing organically from the land and the community? Could this cottage industry film practice help us re-think regional economies and lead to sustainable growth?
Takehiro Watanabe (Sophia University)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation will explore the global interplay of cosmopolitan aesthetics and ecological nativism by discussing how an artistic motif of French impressionism has become a media shorthand for a community-based freshwater biodiversity conservation initiative in Tokyo, Japan.
Paper long abstract:
Aesthetics is expected to play a positive role in biodiversity conservation. Categories such as the beautiful and the picturesque have shaped the development of environmental attitudes and the creation of blue-green spaces such as nature reserves and city parks. But what exactly is that role in urban freshwater biodiversity conservation practices today?
This presentation introduces a case in which a social media influencer commented that a pond in Tokyo, which had been the focus of an on-going, community-based conservation project, bears a resemblance to the water lily paintings of the French artist Claude Monet (1840-1926). For this community and the journalists covering local environmental news, “Monet’s pond” may be a shorthand for a waterscape that is both exquisite in its beauty and healthy in its ecological balance. Yet behind this casual commentary is a long and tangled global history of aesthetic sensibilities and attitudes concerning the natural world, much of which have informed the design of urban parks, the visual arts, and the art of cultivating plant and animal species. Of note is the ethics concerning the relocation of species: biological nativism that informs many conservation initiatives in Japan, such as the eradication of nonnative invasive species, are at odds with the cosmopolitan constitution of urban ecologies and the aesthetic legacy of celebrating species mobility.
This presentation will examine key nodes in the history of exchange between Monet’s pond and this pond in Tokyo. We locate the initial moment of exchange about a century ago in Japonism, the global popularity of Japanese gardens and horticultural breeding, and the use of Western principles in Japanese park design. This past moment is linked to the present moment in biodiversity conservation practices, global proliferation of Monet’s water lily paintings, and the aestheticized representation of cosmopolitan species and people. By attending to this interplay of ideas, materialities, and life, we offer to elucidate the dynamic tension between aesthetics and ethics in today’s urban ecological conservation initiatives.
Atsuko Nakamura
Paper short abstract:
(Artist Talk) A Japanese visual artist reflects on her own work and thinking about environmental and community based art, showing examples of large scale sculptures and a work in progress in a small fishing village.
Paper long abstract:
I trained first as an architect and then at the Slade School of Art in London and have exhibited my large scale sculptures in major Japanese art exhibitions, as well as overseas. I often work with driftwood and make pieces that are affected by the elements and disintegrate with time. I have a particular interest in working with communities, listening to their stories, trying to understand their histories and to express locality and community in my work. I will present some examples of my site-based work and talk around the ideas of making sustainable art, rooted in community, history and place. I will discuss the interplay between art and community and art and the environment. Some of my ideas challenge the expectations of the larger festivals, which are often male-dominated and not receptive to art works that break down and vanish with time. I will talk about art as a different form of memory, the fragility of art in relation to environmental and community fragility. As a case study I will talk about a piece that I created in the 29th UBE biennale, international sculpture competition inspired by undersea mines in Ube City, Yamaguchi Prefecture. The piece is located in Tokiwa park which was built over an Edo period coal mine. There is now a lake there that was dug during the Edo period as a reservoir for agriculture. There are underwater mines in the sea near this park, at least one of which is now flooded. The Park and the sculpture competition were started by the director of undersea mines, the original industry in Ube. My work attempts to express the existence of the mine workers at that time through the physical movement of digging coal with pickaxes and is inspired by the undersea mines in the area. I will also talk about another project I am preparing, to create a sculpture in a remote fishing village on Sado Island.