ruinart x tadashi kawamata | conversation with nature

There’s something quietly radical about showing up to a centuries-old French champagne house with salvaged timber and no fixed plan. But that is, in essence, how Tadashi Kawamata has always worked and why Maison Ruinart came looking for him. The Japanese artist, born in Hokkaidō in 1953 and now splitting his time between Tokyo and Paris, has spent decades placing his structures in the spaces between things: between buildings and sky, between human made and overgrown, between the intentional and the local. His belvederes, walkways and shelter accumulations of reclaimed wood have appeared at the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Centre Pompidou and the Serpentine Gallery. However, they’ve never quite belonged to those institutions. They occupy the threshold. They grow into corners and climb facades. It’s perhaps fitting then, that we find his work here in Berlin this week. A city that has always understood the aesthetic and philosophical weight of in-between spaces, as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin, where Ruinart is presenting his ‘Conversations with Nature’ collaboration. The project connects France, Japan and Germany in ways that feel less orchestrated than simply right: three countries, three distinct relationships to ecological consciousness and contemporary art. Kawamata doesn’t begin with a concept,... Read more » The post ruinart x tadashi kawamata | conversation with nature appeared first on Schön! Magazine.