Dancing with All: The Ecology of Empathy
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art
Kanazawa
Nov 2–Mar 16, 2025

In the Anthropocene, there is no nature without humans, no phenomenon on Earth unimpacted by our activities. “Dancing with All: The Ecology of Empathy,” the 20th-anniversary exhibition at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, centered on this conception of a “new ecology”—a holistic formulation that seeks to position humanity’s existence as interdependent with other species’ survival. Led by the museum’s director, Yuko Hasegawa, with philosopher Emanuele Coccia, and co-curators Ayumi Ikeda and Jin Motohashi, “Dancing with All” presented more than 20 contemporary artists—some of whom are also scientists or work with researchers—utilizing a range of media as “sensory learning experiences” to build emotional connections and understandings of the nonhuman. In addition, the exhibition featured curated displays of works by Inuit and Indigenous artists of the Amazon region, the Pacific Northwest, and Africa, whose worldviews and cultures remain more closely intertwined to the natural world than postindustrial societies.

A wall diagram at the exhibition’s outset demonstrated curators’ interest in privileging forms of visual thinking over the written word. Here they mapped out the links between artistic projects through curving lines connecting the project’s four major themes: “Nature x Human,” “Nature Translation,” “Material Transition,” and “Material Enchantment.” At the center of this illustrated flowchart is the word “Dance,” represented by a drawing by Amazon Indigenous artist Joseca Yanomami of five figures and a cat soaring into the sky on the wings of a giant bird. Dance, in this formulation, embodies the rhythmic interconnectedness of beings, much like the looping lines of this illustration and the winding itinerary of “Dancing with All” through the boxy galleries and open spaces of the museum.

One strategy artists have adopted to move beyond an entirely anthropocentric perspective is attempting collaborations with animals. Among those in the “Nature x Human” sector was Aki Inomata’s ongoing project with beavers, How to Carve a Sculpture (2018–), for which she sent pieces of wood to various zoos. After voracious masticators had gnawed on the beams, she turned the chewed pieces into wooden replicas (using CNC machines) at three times the scale—much closer to human size. The resulting works humorously resemble rough-hewn Constantin Brâncuși sculptures, and represent these animals as the creators—upending the role of the human artist vis-à-vis natural materials. Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s project On the Origins of Art I and II (2016) with the Maratus spider genus similarly riffed on imagining animals as artists. Using macro photography and sensitive microphones, Cardoso records the courtship displays of these tiny, four-to-six-millimeter creatures and the psychedelic, Marc Rothko-like abstractions found on the flaps they display. (In addition, the sound artist Andrew Belletty designed an oval platform on which viewers can sit to experience the vibrations the spiders emit as part of their dance.) Like peacocks and humans, Cardoso proposes, these spiders are the artists, using inventive displays and costumes to attract desirous attention.

How nature’s raw energy can be translated into novel artistic forms was explored by several artists. Residing in Florence, Stefano Mancuso is a professor of plant neurobiology. He creates his monoprints by gathering plants each morning and pressing them into paper while they are still fresh so that their colors bleed together with the ink. Mancuso is also the instigator of the research group PNAT (Project Nature), which designed a glass cube to house plants and a large monitor. The installation, titled Talking God (2021/24), routed bio-signals from a 1,000-year-old zelkova tree at the Shinmeigu Shrine in Kanazawa, translating the data into visual patterns of light on screen. Also working with Kanazawa traditions and ecology was the ikebana-trained conceptual artist Kuniko Donen, who had originally conceived the project Moso Bamboo Cube for Kanazawa’s Oyama Shrine in 1988. In this reprised work, bamboo stalks are cut into sections and then divided by thickness from base to tip, before being grouped into cubes. Resembling minimalist sculptures, the rope-bundled sections find their geometric form according to the organic dimensions of the plant.

As with ikebana, craft practices are closely tied to the natural cycles of growth (from wood to wool), and can be seen occupying a place in the “Material Transition” sector. Eva Jospin’s sculptures of natural landscapes—most dramatically, a forest of trees in the installation Forêt Palatine (2019–20)—are made from cardboard, a product originally derived from wood. Otobong Nkanga’s textiles of the Unearthed series (2021), each more than three to four meters wide and stacked three high up to the ceiling, depict human traces on the surface of the sea, the aquatic life below, and the ocean floor. At every level, the natural environment is lined with nets, trash, and other plastic remnants that were directly incorporated into the tapestries. 

The complexity—and inherently contrived, heavily mediated forms—of contemporary art appeared in stark contrast to the two galleries devoted to drawings by Indigenous artists: one spanning the Inuit, Northwestern Pacific peoples, and Africa, and another to the Amazon region. In these images, the lives of humans and animals are much more closely integrated, as nature appears both as the context for life itself and also psychically in dreams or mythology.

“Dancing with All” suggested that if humans were more empathetic toward nature we would act more ethically and stop wrecking the natural world on which we ourselves also rely. While the beauty of miniature spiders, the ingenuity of beavers, or the augustness of an ancient tree are undeniable, the reality of natural ecosystems is not that they are built on anthropomorphic emotions or values. No species determines its survival while considering the beauty or needs of others, and in this holistic sense, humans appear to be no different. Regardless of our individual appreciation for certain species, how we connect our collective societal actions to their survival still remains a complex question, with empathy as perhaps only the first step. 

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