This Symposium addresses environmental issues of special interest to the public. Please feel free to join.

Please click here for the full program.

⇒ YouTube Live

Date & Hours:	Saturday, February 27, 2016, 13:00 – 17:00
Venue:	Nanzenji, Kyoto (Nanzenji-Fukuchi-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto-city) ( → Access)
Host:	The Research Institute for Humanity and Nature
Notes:	Admission free, children welcome Language: Japanese／English　(with simultaneous translation) Please be aware that we will stream this symposium live to YouTube Live in both Japanese and English.
Abstract:	How do we see the places in which we live? And how can we reimagine them? Japan is a famously urbanized society, replete with seductive imagery of modern life. Yet, like all industrial societies, Japan is still dependent on rural places, and on a complex network of plans an infrastructures―roads, power stations, dams, canals, and cables―built to make rural resources available to urban populations. These structures surround and support the everyday lives of urban people, yet they remain curiously out-of-mind and out-of-sight. At the same time, rural places are increasingly abandoned, forests grow thick, old roads are no longer travelled. Rural towns grow lonely and derelict, like ruins, even as so many ideal images of Japan continue to draw from the rural past, which survives as if it w ere a vast collective unconscious. This symposium invites five distinguished photographers and curators, all students of contemporary landscapes and landscape change, to help us see what is and imagine what might be. In discussing their work and their goals, they ask us to see what actually exists, because how we see our places has a lot to do with how we see ourselves. And without seeing ourselves, it is impossible to imagine what we might become.
Contact:	The Research Institute for Humanity and Nature Public Relations Subunit 457-4 Motoyama, Kamigamo, Kita-ku, Kyoto, 603-8047 JAPAN Tel：+81-75-707-2128 Open 8:30 – 17:00 on weekdays

Program

1. 13:00 – 13:05

Opening Remarks Tetsuzo YASUNARI, Director-General, RIHN

2. 13:05 – 13:10

Objectives of the Symposium Kenichi ABE, Professor, RIHN

3. 13:10 – 13:40

Keynote Address　Daniel NILES, Associate Professor, RIHN

　Imaginary landscapes: The real and the possible

4. 13:40 – 14:20

Presentation by Panelists

Presentation 1 Toshio SHIBATA, Photographer

　Borrowing a place

Presentation 2 Taishi HIROKAWA, Photographer

　The landscape of accomplished factt

5. 14:20 – 14:35

Break

6. 14:35 – 15:35

Presentation by Panelists

Presentation 3 Hiroyasu YAMAUCHI, Curator of Rias Ark Museum of Art

　Disaster and landscape

Presentation 4 　Masahiro SEKIGUCHI, Art Front Gallery

　Spaces for transformation: The Echigo-Tsumari Project

Presentation 5 　Chieko KITADE, Curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

　The exhibition as a landscape woven by artist and viewer: The role of art museums

7. 15:35 – 15:45

Break

8. 15:45 – 16:55

Panel and public discussion

Toshio SHIBATA／Taishi HIROKAWA／Hiroyasu YAMAUCHI／Masahiro SEKIGUCHI／Chieko KITADE

Ken-ichi ABE, Moderator

9. 16:55 – 17:00

Closing Daniel NILES