Critical Zone: Practices about the Ecosystem

The Critical Zone is the name for the area that includes soil we stand upon and the air that envelops the earth in a thin, membrane-like layer, and in recent years it has been used often as a theme in international exhibitions. The cracks separating our lives and the global environment are not a recent development, but contemporary society has certainly made those cracks grow larger. How to understand and accept this changing order on a cosmic scale, and how to live through this complicated era? This talk will feature ideas surrounding the Critical Zone.

Speakers:
Maritn Guinard (Curator of LUMA)
Hiroki Yamamoto (Lecturer of Kanazawa College of Art)

Speakers’ Profiles

Maritn Guinard
Martin Guinard is co-curator of LUMA Days. With a background in visual arts and art history, he has worked on several interdisciplinary projects dealing with ecological mutation in collaboration with Bruno Latour. He was the curator of the Taipei 2020 biennial entitled “You and I don’t live on the same planet” and is currently working on its reiteration at the Centre Pompidou Metz (opening in November 2021). He co-curated the exhibition “Critical Zone” at ZKM, Karlsruhe (2020-2021) and the exhibition “Reset Modernity!” (2016). He also directed two workshop platforms continuing the research initiated in the exhibition Reset Modernity! in Shanghai (2017) and Tehran (2017-2018).

Hiroki Yamamoto
Hiroki Yamamoto (b. 1986, Chiba, Japan) is Lecturer at Kanazawa College of Art. Yamamoto graduated from Hitotsubashi University in 2010 and completed his M.A. in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL), London in 2013. In 2018, he received a Ph.D. from the University of the Arts London. From 2013 until 2018, he worked at Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) as a postgraduate research fellow. After working at Asia Culture Center (ACC) in Gwangju, South Korea as a research fellow and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the School of Design as a postdoctoral fellow, he was Assistant Professor at Tokyo University of the Arts until 2020. His single-authored publications are The History of Contemporary Art: Euro-America, Japan, and Transnational (Chuo Koron Sha, 2019) and Art of the Post-Anthropocene (Bijutsu Shuppan sha, 2022). His co-authored publications include Media and Culture in Transnational Asia (Rutgers University Press, 2020), Socially Engaged Public Art in East Asia (Vernon Press, 2022), and Art and the New Ecology: The Anthropocene as a ‘Dithering Time’ (Ibunsha, 2022).