Paper short abstract:

Fukasawa Takafumi’s collaborative art projects give form to new naturecultures but take place within festivals that reproduce a nature/culture binary. Despite this tension, I will argue that Fukasawa’s projects do contribute to wider changes in systems of meaning towards a survivable future.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation I will explore the work Fukasawa Takafumi, a social art practitioner now entering mid-career. His practice is a valuable focus for study of the tensions between competing naturecultures operative in Japan today.

Each of Fukasawa’s projects explore a single question relating to an aspect of religiosity, spirituality or historical practice that is specific to the locality of that project. They take place over several months, in collaboration with people living in the local area, for whom the central question of the project holds particular importance.

For instance, in 2019 Fukasawa used collective filmmaking and archival processes to explore the contemporary significance of Mount Myōken (a sacred site in Nichiren Buddhism) in the lives of residents of nearby postwar new towns. These towns were constructed as satellites of Osaka, along with transport arteries that positioned the city at the centre of social and economic life. In the intervening decades however, Mount Myōken has disrupted this relationship, leading to new naturecultures that entangle agencies both physical and metaphysical, as well as organic and inorganic. These naturecultures are given form in Fukasawa’s projects.

However, his projects usually take place as commissions within rural art festivals that seek to engage and reproduce a more hegemonic nature/culture binary. This is from a perspective that is broadly either neoliberal (where ‘nature’ is an asset to be leveraged for economic revitalization) or modern, in which that revitalization is performed by metropolitan visitors working alongside local residents – a pairing explicitly promoted as an ideal conjunction of two identities, both exceptional in their respective, complementary forms of immaterial capital: visitors’ expertise in ‘culture’, and locals’ closer relationship to ‘nature’.

In this presentation I shall investigate how the tensions between these competing naturecultures play out in Fukasawa’s projects, within art festivals. I will use sources from across disciplines including contemporary art theory, anthropology, oral history, practice theories and the philosophy of games, and from interviews conducted with the artist. I will argue that Fukasawa’s projects nonetheless contribute to wider changes in systems of meaning that make a survivable future more likely.