Title
The Parks of Aomame
Inspired by Haruki Murakami's enigmatic character, Aomame, from his novel 1Q84, The Parks of Aomame will run through the city of Okayama. These interconnected parks, both real and imagined, will draw upon Aomame's silent struggles and her complex existence within two parallel worlds.
The Okayama Art Summit 2025 will transform the city into a realm in which reality and imagination blend seamlessly. This ambitious event will reimagine Okayama’s public spaces, forgotten corners and urban parks, creating a map of wonder.
This forthcoming summit is not simply a visual art exhibition.
At the heart of it is a curated Guild of artists, musicians, architects, designers, scientists, writers and thinkers from all over the world — each selected for their unique ability to inspire and provoke new forms.
Together, this group will transform the city into a laboratory where the organic and synthetic, the biotic and artificial and the real and virtual merge.
Okayama will become a site of speculation where the citizen and visitor will be exposed by the Guild to different moments and forms that will occur for the two-month period of the summit - this time being the time of an exposure. Things will happen by day but also by night.
The Parks of Aomame will be an open-air exhibition in which pedestrian crossings turn into stages, and city squares evolve into spaces for reflection and exchange transforming everyday interactions into moments of discovery. The triennale will open up multiple imaginative scenarios. Central to this experience will be to follow the "Aomame Path", a route connecting the various interventions scattered throughout the city. As you walk this path, you will be exposed to small, ethereal and surprising interventions. You will experience the emergence of a fiction through the city. Ideas sparked in one location will evolve and travel through the urban landscape, encouraging the cross-pollination of thoughts and experiences.
Okayama will become not just a backdrop but a participant in this experiment.
Each intervention and performance will add a layer of narrative to Okayama's urban fabric: parallel realities will offer glimpses into alternative versions of the city, Character-Inhabited Zones will be 'inhabited' by fictional characters, and narrative crossroads will allow visitors to choose their own path through the city.
The city will become a text to be read, interpreted, and rewritten. Street signs, building facades, and public announcements might subtly be altered to reflect fictional elements, blurring the line between the city's actual history and imagined narratives.
Residents and visitors alike will be invited to gather and weave together the dreams and imaginings of Okayama's residents into the Triennale’s evolving storyline. The line between art-event and daily life will become blurred through fictional services, time slips in which clocks and calendars operate differently, and alternate histories commemorated by plaques and monuments seamlessly integrate with real historical markers.
We look forward to meeting you there…it is going to be so fun.
