Living with Otherness is an art-practice-based research project developed through long-term engagement with forests in Hokkaido, northern Japan. Through field observation, collaboration with researchers and other specialists, sculptural elements, moving image, sound and storytelling, the project explores how artistic practice can create sensory and affective encounters with ecological relationships.
Drawing upon scientific research, local histories, field experiences, and imagination, the project traces relationships between volcanoes, springs, trees, fog, ocean currents, humans, and other living beings. Through encounters with forces and lives unfolding across different timescales, the forest gradually emerges as a dynamic ecology of coexistence.
The presentation includes a lecture performance and a discussion of the project's artistic and research processes. Reflecting on artistic practice as a mode of ecological inquiry, the presentation explores storytelling as a way of sensing, imagining, and recognising our entanglement with human and more-than-human others.
Aki Nagasaka is an artist based in Hiroshima, Japan. Valuing personal encounters and embodied experiences, she is interested in learning from the stories, histories, wisdom, and skills that people, other living beings, and places have carried and sustained through time. Through fieldwork, collaboration, storytelling, and a range of artistic media, she explores relationships between humans and more-than-human others, and how artistic practice can create different ways of sensing and understanding the worlds we inhabit.
Nagasaka is a Lecturer at Hiroshima City University and a PhD candidate at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Her activities span a wide range of practices, including exhibitions, writing and publishing, translation, education, and public talks and lectures.
Image:
Moeruyama / Burning Mountain
Video on Volcanic Ash
Living with Otherness – Exhibition View at Glass Pyramid, Moerenuma Park
Photo: Yoshisato Komaki