AMBIENT AGENCY - dis/entangling force fields with awai

In an era where global environmental crises and socio-economic inequalities and divisions are accelerating, we are being confronted with a fundamental question: “Through what worldview and perspective do we face and live within the societies of the future?

We are now facing the limitations of modern socio-economic systems based on dualistic thinking—such as the separation of "humans and nature," "economy and culture," or "matter and spirit"—as well as those rooted in anthropocentrism and colonialism. What is being called for is a paradigm shift—a profound transformation that goes beyond conventional assumptions and established norms.

Ambient Agency will host guest talks, exhibitions and performances in Paris and London in autumn 2025, bringing together artists, scholars and practitioners from Europe, Japan, Asia and other regions who resonate with these questions. It will shed light on how the material elements that shape our planet—air, water, fire, earth and wind—are not only material, but deeply entangled with social, political, intellectual, and ideological worlds. This project will also draw inspiration from Japanese philosophy and anthropology to reconsider spatial and energetic concepts such as ma (space, interval) and ki (energy, atmosphere), as well as relational sensibilities such as awai (ambiguity, milieu), ba (physical and foundational field), and the cultural practice of “reading the atmosphere.”

By engaging these traditional concepts in dialogue with contemporary social and environmental issues, and by thinking with the open-ended currents that weave these multifaceted elemental worlds together, we aim to develop a nuanced vocabulary and conceptual toolbox to reimagine the entanglements that define our times.

*AWAI(あわい) is an ancient Japanese concept of the plural, ambiguous, and non-dualistic space in-between.

■Program Details■

14:00 Opening
Yasuhiro Kobayashi 〔Founder of Ecological Memes〕

14:10 - 14:50 Listening Session
Artist: Tomoko Sauvage〔Artist〕
Tomoko Sauvage proposes a listening session of music and sound works composed with and around water in the 1960’s and onward until today. From water-based instruments such as water gongs to field recordings of rivers, deep seas and aquatic animals, the listening session features works by Annea Lockwood, Knud Viktor, Jana Winderen, Pablo Diserens and more.

15:00 - 16:10
Cobuilding Response-Ability with 大地: Insights from Habitat Building History and Ryuiki Regeneration

How have humans responded to the earth and built habitats of liveability? What regenerative wisdom have we developed in the process? In this session, we welcome Japanese architectural historian Noriko Matsuda to explore her theory of “habitat building history” as an alternative mode of conceptualising symmetrical earth-human history. By bringing this theory into conversation with regenerative practices of ryuiki (watershed) in Japan, this session will draw new horizons for cobuilding our response and responsibility for the earth/terrain/大地.

Speakers:Noriko Matsuda〔Associate Professor of Architectural and Urban History at Kyoto Prefectural University〕, Yasuhiro Kobayashi〔Founder of Ecological Memes〕, Shuhei Tashiro 〔Moderator / Anthropologist・Ecological Memes

16:15 - 18:00 Talk Session:
Elemental Forms of Vernacular Crisis and Restoration in New Natures
As infrastructures of environmental and agricultural control reshape landscapes, crisis and restoration have emerged in unlikely elemental ways. In this session, designer and researcher Flora Weil, cultural geographer and creative practitioner Sasha Engelman, and scholar and photographer Saori Ogura will engage in a conversation on various forms of not only elemental disasters but creative acts of adaptation that are remaking and restoring landscape ecologies in response. Drawing on their projects in Chinese deserts, Californian wildfires, Japanese mountains, and more, the panelists will explore how gamified greening, gendered poetics of wind, and local environmental knowledge emerge in the "new natures" of the elemental Anthropocene.

Speakers:Sasha Engelmann〔Geographer・Artist〕, Flora Weil〔Designer ・Researcher ・ Artist〕+ Libby Hoffenberg〔Artist〕, Saori Ogura〔Scholar・Photographer〕, Shuhei Tashiro 〔Moderator / Anthropologist・Ecological Memes〕

18:05 - 18:20 Reflective Time
Yasuhiro Kobayashi〔Founder of Ecological Memes〕, Stefano Vendramin 〔Founder of STRATA ART〕

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This event is followed by the dialogic works with Suiten no Kotoba Cards
You are warmly invited to register for both or either one.