Artist talk
Living with Otherness: Art, Storytelling and Situated Ecology in Hokkaido
Welcome to this artist talk by Aki Nagasaka, followed by a panel discussion of four artists invited by Creative Agency and Environmental Humanities (University of Oslo)
Program
10:00 – Welcome by Susanne M. Winterling, Oslo National Academy of the Arts
10:05 – Aki Nagasaka “Living with Otherness: Art, Storytelling and Situated Ecology in Hokkaido”, Q&A
11:30 – Break
11:45 – Panel discussion “Creative Agency and Environmental Humanities” with Aki Nagasaka, Michael Leung, Mia Yu and Kristiina Koskentola, chaired by Sarah Chen Huang, ECOART, University of Oslo
12:45 – Closing remarks
About the talk
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 recognizing 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. She 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.
Discussants
Michael Leung is an artist/designer, writer, researcher and visiting lecturer based in Hong Kong. His practice is situated in everyday life, affected by convivial encounters, and inspired by different autonomous spaces—some of which he shares with students, in zines and with(in) different social movements.
Mia Yu is an artist, art historian, and independent curator working between Paris and Beijing. Her practice is built on long-term field research at large-scale infrastructures and extractive sites, and examines the complex relationships between post-extractive nature, cosmology, and geopolitics in the Asian context.
Kristiina Koskentola, PhD, is a Finnish transdisciplinary artist with Karelian heritage, currently dividing her time between Amsterdam, Helsinki and Northern China. Her interdisciplinary, multisensory and collaborative practice, spanning moving image, sound, publications, musical performances and convivial cooking events, engages with ecological philosophy, shamanic knowledge systems and posthuman discourse.
Collaborators
This event is organized by the research project Creative Agency and Environmental Humanities at Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities, hosted by Prof. Susanne M. Winterling at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, in collaboration with the research projects An Ecological History of Eurasian Art and Amber Worlds.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. This event is supported by ERC grants (ERC, ECOART, 101124354, and ERC, AMBER, 101075511).