“When the British came they did not understand the trees. African land was presented as jungle to be conquered. There was fever to tame land. They literally burnt the forest to ashes.” Wangari Maathai

Wangechi Mutu has chosen to set this powerful quote from the late Kenyan activist against her video work, ‘The End of Carrying All’ (2015), as part of her contribution to the Aichi Triennale 2025. The film follows a woman carrying a heavy basket on her head as she toils against an increasingly apocalyptic landscape. At once a stereotypical market woman and the embodiment of the myth of Sisyphus, she eventually succumbs to the burden of modernism and becomes one with the earth.

This meditative intervention at the Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum reminds us of the ongoing environmental and social impact of colonialism. “The piece represents all the women in the world whose toil is infinite because of the relentless need for ‘progress’ since the Industrial Revolution,” Mutu explains. “Progress is this building and accumulation of places and things, and it’s often women and poor people who have to bear the brunt.”

Maathai’s words also help to situate us in Mutu’s homelands, Kenya’s Central Province, where the British originally flocked to for its temperate climate. “Mutu was an activist, a feminist, a rebel and a radical who positioned environmental activism as a human rights activism,” she adds. “Her ideas inform my current research into land and freedom during the origination of Kenya. My people’s land was hilly, so the English had them get rid of the forest to make it feel like home. That meant they were getting rid of the soil, which held the rivers and allowed them to flow, leading to some of the environmental degradation and human justice issues we have today. This all correlates with my interest in women’s representation and holistic concern and compassion for the planet.”

Elsewhere around the museum lays the kinds of mythical creatures and hybrid forms that populate this renowned artist’s multi-disciplinary practice. Two large bronze kikapu baskets hold a coiled snake Nyoka (2022) and sea turtle Kobe (2022), both cosy and at rest. And at the main entrance we’re welcomed by ‘Sleeping Serpent’ (2014-2025), her giant rubberised body ripe from consuming a big meal, and her ceramic face (that of the artist) gently surrounded by anthropomorphic dreams. Drawing on East African folklore and afro-futurist world-making, these pieces symbolise the ancient powers and wisdoms that can lead us to a liberated future in harmony with nature. “A lot of the work I’m doing right now is full of soil and wood and rocks and materials from the land. So, as I go back to the Central Province and harvest some of that material, I am harvesting its archive to find out really went on there as the British locked up our freedom fighters.”

Mutu’s works speaks directly to the Aichi Triennale’s theme ‘A time between ashes and roses’ (a line from a 1970 poem by Syrian writer Adonis). This sixth edition of the arts festival brings 62 artists and collectives from around the world to venues across this region of Japan to consider the co-dependent relationship between humans and nature. Neither accepting the death-knell of apocalypse nor rushing toward an impossible nirvana, we’re here to face down the barrel of historical legacies of violence that continue to trample over indigenous ways of protecting and replenishing our habitats in order to author alternative pathways to repair.

The festival’s artistic director Hoor Al Qasimi (president of the Sharjah Art Foundation) hopes to propose an open invitation that rejects polarised positions while connecting universal themes with local concerns. “Thinking about the environment and our existence on this planet is something everybody can relate to. While I want to bring an urgency to the fore – politically, socially and ecologically on a global scale – the theme is also rooted to this region’s interest in ceramics production, mining and the ocean,” Al Qasimi explains. In addition, “it was important to break down barriers between art and popular culture. The local curatorial team helped me with our selection of manga and regional artists and the educational programming reaches many different communities.”

Collaborative works and site-specific commissions are central to this macro-micro dialogue. Ghana’s Hive Earth studio, which specialises in sustainable construction using a rammed earth technique, worked with Aichi’s learning team for ‘Convex Concave’ (2025). This workshop with a group of young male offenders from Seto City has created living furniture from Aichi’s precious, clay-rich soils. After six months, it will be broken down and returned to the earth, suggesting a restorative relationship with the environment. “It was quite moving because these boys have found it difficult to integrate in to society but are now really passionate about using this material to build their own homes,” Al Qasimi reflects.

Japanese artist Sasaki Rui was invited to take over a three-generations-old public bathhouse (sento) in Seto City. She researched the history of local plants and preserved ashen samples in glass panels to create the glowing installation ‘Unforgettable Residues’ (2025). As you encounter the lovingly kept space, you’re drawn to peer into every crevise where archival imagery of the area and its people are held safe. “Traditionally, bath houses were where people came to meet, to share information. And now older people can return here and share their memories of this place,” Rui says.

Also in Seto City, Adrian Villar Rojas has transformed an abandoned primary school into an ode to our primordial ancestors, entitled ‘XXXXXX’. The Argentinian artist and his team took 18 months to plaster the walls of what he calls this already “dystopian setting” with digital prints of our ancestors in psychedelic settings. Both unsettling and alluring in the way it warps time and space, the installation asks us to ponder the bias of archeology and humanity’s looming extinction in a facility now defunct due to Japan’s declining birth rates.

Meanwhile at the Aichi Arts Centre in Nagoya, Palestinian artist Mirna Barnia has taken over a kitchen and restaurant space with a two-part work addressing the sensory language of food. ‘Sour Cords’ (2024) comprises suspended ceramic sculptures of okra, garlic and cloves – flavours familiar to all for their heady pungency when dried in the sun. And ‘Bitter Things: In the name of an orange’ introduces a darkened scene covered in clay rubble and interspersed with videos of voices and hands working with this prized fruit. We’re left to think about how the occupation of Palestine has long disrupted its agricultural practices yet its storied methods of food preservation remain resilient acts of unity.

A special moment of the festival’s opening weekend was the world premiere of ‘Enemy of the Sun’ by Basel Abbas (Cyprus) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (Palestine) at a Nagoya nightclub. The duo collaborated with Palestinian musicians Baraari, Haykal and Julmud as well as local producers and DJs to offer up dance-worthy soundscape against which new footage from Palestine captured the nation’s landscapes under threat and the communities resisting erasure. This complimented Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s multi-channel video installation ‘May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth: only sounds that tremble through us’ (2020-22) at Aichi Arts Centre, a work bearing witness to death and displacement through songs and dance from Palestine, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

“It felt quite significant to physically share their experiences here in Aichi. The heavy sounds directly move you,” says head of curatorial Iida Shihoko of Abbas and Abou-Rahme. “This edition’s theme may have originally sprung from what is happening in the Arab World but in Japan we have also suffered devastating loss, from the world wars to natural disasters. So, it’s important that we share with the rest of the world and learn from each other. We are all in this together.”

Read our Aichi Triennale interview with Faustus Linyekula here.

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