‘Dancing with All’ Is More Tussle Than Dance

‘What is scary about being lost in a forest […] is catching a glimpse of yourself, from the point of view of the trees,’ writes philosopher Timothy Morton in The Ecological Thought (2010), which argues that intelligence is not the exclusive domain of human beings. This notion is taken up by ‘Dancing with All: The Ecology of Empathy’, the last in a series of exhibitions at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, which considers the intersection of culture, nature and technology today and probes the curious connections between humans, animals, plants and objects.

An earthquake struck Kanazawa on 1 January 2024, forcing the museum to close and making its subsequent presentation of a show that knits together insights by biologists, think tanks and artists feel particularly salient. The natural world they jointly picture in ‘Dancing with All’ is not straightforward; parts of it – as envisioned by several participating artists – even display a will of their own. Quercus (2020), a film by the Milan-based duo Formafantasma, recalls Morton’s words as it adopts the vantage point of trees. Active laser scanning, ordinarily used to transform trees into pure data, is here directed at the viewer, imagining how humans might be seen from the perspective of the woodlands on which they rely as natural resources. In Cambio (Change, exchange, 2020), also by Formafantasma, shots of dense forest are interrupted by a small chromakey block of green, which is eventually filled with footage from an industrial paper plant. The green screen – perhaps a stand-in for the human eye – seems disinterested in the trees themselves and the varieties of wildlife that may inhabit them.

From a forest interior to a Japanese zoo: Tokyo-based artist Aki Inomata catches sight of her own inescapable subjectivity in How to Carve a Sculpture (2018–ongoing), a mixed-media installation inspired by blocks of wood gnawed by a group of captive American beavers, which the artist scans and meticulously reproduces on an almost-human scale. Objects ‘sculpted’ by the animals, and painstakingly remade by Inomata, are held ‘captive’ in digital space. Elsewhere, Talking God (2024) by Florence-based think tank PNAT (Project Nature), a version of which premiered in 2021, uses subtle sensing to detect every movement of the branches belonging to an enormous, 1,000-year-old zelkova tree standing on the grounds of Kanazawa’s Shinmeigu shrine. These movements are relayed onto a screen at the museum, redrawn in real-time as energetic visuals. To the viewer, the tree appears abstract; within the shrine’s Buddhist framework, it is omnipresent and exists beyond its physical form.

In the end, though, ‘Dancing with All’ is less a measurement of nature than a picture of humankind’s dysfunction in its presence; humans are framed as ‘other’, struggling to adapt where nature flourishes. When last year’s earthquake dislodged parts of the museum ceiling, participating artist Adrián Villar Rojas responded by lining the entire ceiling in one room with The Theater of Disappearance (2017), an enlarged re-creation of Piero della Francesca’s 15th-century fresco Madonna del Parto, a scene meant to provide comfort. It hovers over The End of Imagination I (2022): a chaotic sculpture that Villar Rojas made from materials as varied as soil, concrete and plastic. Despite the show’s title, this monstrous merger of what the exhibition text calls ‘handcraft and machine intelligence’ is more empathic tussle than dance. Like many works in the show, The End of Imagination I wrestles with conflicting perspectives, exploring experiences of loss and underscoring the need, in the spirit of American writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), to listen to the trees and the dispossessed – a sentiment which now feels more urgent than ever.

‘Dancing with All: The Ecology of Empathy’ is on view at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, until 16 March

^{Main image: Otobong Nkanga, Unearthed–Sunlight, 2021, detail, installation view, ‘Dancing with All: The Ecology of Empathy’, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Courtesy: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; photograph: Akira Yuasa}