The Future of the Biennale: Through the Forest Festival of the Arts Okayama

In the autumn of 2024, the first Forest Festival of the Arts Okayama - Clear-skies Country was held in the northern region of Okayama Prefecture from September 28 to November 24. This new initiative drew attention as a platform where artistic expression intersected with global perspectives.

Directed by Yuko Hasegawa—Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and Professor Emeritus at Tokyo University of the Arts—the festival featured 43 artists and collectives from 12 countries and regions. Their works were installed across a diverse, expansive natural landscape spanning 12 municipalities. Engaging deeply with the area’s history, climate, and culture, the artists explored the relationship between humans and nature.

How did art take root and come alive in a region that has seen relatively few large-scale art events? Philosopher Emanuele Coccia offers his interpretation of the festival’s broader significance. [Tokyo Art Beat]

The famous Greek philosopher and writer Plutarch tells us that Romulus, the mythical figure revered as the founder of Rome, before founding the city, dug a circular pit in which to deposit “the beginnings of all that is good for Law or necessary for Nature.” The word 'world' (mundus) comes from the name of this ritual space (Plut, Rom, 11,2). This legend is suggestive of the spirit that seems to be at the basis of every urban reality: a city is not simply a machine created to allow a defined number of human beings to live together, but the attempt to build a world, to separate and distill the best part from what exists and make human cohabitation coincide with this 'absolute good.'

One could think that every exhibition is a sort of repetition of this ancestral gesture, but with one big difference: instead of burying the good, it is displayed in the open air, and for a limited time, the urban landscape coincides with this same collection of the best artifacts produced by the city. One could say, then, that exhibitions are exercises in cosmogonic improvisation, the place where a population expresses its idea of the world and tries to make it visible, knowable, and experienceable in a limited space and time.

The necessity of a choice and a selection for reality to become a world is less of a physical order than a moral one. Choice produces a better existence: it allows us to move from what is good to what is 'better.' It is this moral increment, this increase of the good in reality, that transforms what exists into a world. Space and time become the world only when a place and a moment succeed in concentrating on what is good and what is better for us.

Since the invention of the “general exposition,” European modernity has used this device to review the “first fruits” of the industrial, artistic, and technological production of the nations that had gone through the industrial revolution. It is from that moment that museums have perhaps unconsciously abandoned the archaeological model that generated them; it was no longer a question of conserving the past, but of incubating the future. Exhibitions became cocoons where a city or a nation tried to imagine its future.

For more than a century, art biennials have allowed us to domesticate this device at the service of art: it was a question of imagining the future of painting, sculpture, architecture, performance, design, dance, and all the other artistic disciplines that gradually became part of the fine arts system. The characteristic of the biennials was their planetary horizon: thanks to this, art has gradually been conceived and considered as an objectively intercultural exercise, a platform where different cultures can meet and mix and come to build a common grammar, a sort of lingua franca of which every artist is both speaker and poet.

The success of the biennial model, especially in the last few decades, is immediately visible in its multiplication: there are biennials everywhere, to the point that it would almost take a biennial of biennials to select what is involved in this exercise of reducing the world to its exhibition, which is becoming widespread. With mass diffusion, a very elaborate form of criticism has also developed: these exhibitions seem to have an increasingly abstract and ephemeral relationship with the territory that hosts them, to the point of making one wonder if the time has come to modify the mechanics and physiology of this model.

The biennial “Tuning in to the forest” in Okayama, curated by Yuko Hasegawa, is very important first and foremost because, beyond the sublime selection of works it represents, it embodies one of the most radical and interesting attempts to reform the biennial model.

There are at least two elements that make it an example to be imitated in the future. First, the choice to adopt a wider stage, which no longer coincides exclusively with a single museum or a single city, but is aimed at a wider, more complex, heterogeneous territory. The series of works and exhibitions is dispersed and spread throughout cities and villages, but also completely disparate natural spaces.

Bianca Bondi's work is in the old Nakashima hospital, Ernesto Neto's is in a park, Jukan Tateisi's is in a forest, but Anri Sala's work is at the bottom of the Ikurado caves, and can only be seen after a thirty-minute caving trip, which is only possible if you have the necessary equipment to enter such an environment. But it's not simply a question of abandoning the now-mistreated white box. Because the works are not simply placed in different places for futile scenographic whims. Each of them interacts with the space and radically changes its meaning and reality.

The boards created with Sofia Crespo's AI, for example, are immersed in the magnificent and surreal Tsuyama Wonder Museum, confused among the other objects, but because of them, the whole museum appears transfigured, as if it were in its entirety a work created with artificial intelligence.

Tarek Atoui's installation is located in Joto's Old Townhouses (Former Kajimura Residence), and the subtle dialogue between the visible forms of the musical instruments created by the artist and the unusual sounds they produce radically transforms the very idea of traditional Japanese housing. Giacomo Zaganelli's installation allows for the transformation not only of the physical, natural, and biological landscape but also, and above all, of the human and social landscape.

One could say that in this way, Yuko Hasegawa rethinks and radicalizes the very idea of Land Art: rather than making the work an intervention on the land considered as pure non-cultural soil, an entity that precedes any form of cultural intervention, she makes each artistic object a commutator of the identity of the space already shaped by history and civilization. Those places will never be the same again, and even when the works disappear, it will be impossible to look at them with the same eyes as before. The Biennale becomes less a collection of objects that allow us to think about the future and more an attempt to transform the present world. It is something closer to a huge landscape architecture operation. This is also true because to visit each of the works, it is necessary to undertake journeys of hours to observe the territory, understand it, and rethink it.

For this reason, there is another aspect that makes this biennial unique. It is as if, precisely because of this renewed link with the territory, each work is transformed into a sort of new cartography of the visited territory. This impression is clearly felt when observing the works of Rirkrit Tiravanija in the Shurakuen Garden. And Yuka Mori's works seem to be herbaria or descriptions of a new flora, a new fauna that inhabits those landscapes. And the artists don't just concentrate on the earth: Aki Inomata makes her work a new map of the sky through which to auscultate the clouds, observe them, and transform them into a sort of spirit guide for our existence.

Rarely has a biennial reached the depth and radicalism of the cosmogonic exercise to which Yuko Hasegawa has lent herself. What this biennial attempts to rethink and re-establish is the meaning and necessity of art on this planet. We need it more than ever.

* Originally written for “Tuning in to the Forest: Forest Festival of the Arts Okayama - Clear-skies Country 2024 Official Catalogue” (PURPLE, 2025).