YOKOHAMA TRIENNALE 2020 TO START WITH THE EPISŌDOS

Sometimes we forget the simple fact that there are about 1000 days between two Triennials. We want to consider some part of these days as a passage where many (from all over the world) regard, scrutinize, and wonder upon the various impulses shaping this specific edition. By expanding our conversation, we could soften hard partitions between discourse and practice, research and art making, the minor and the major, concealment and revelation.This conversation needs to course through the way artworks and utterances are anticipated, absorbed, and relayed.

We offer a sequence of intermittent, short-durée occurrences that we call Episōdos (from the Japanese for ‘episodes’), so as to provide an opportunity for such conversations. The word Episōdo is chosen to consider what happens when a scene seizes the attention of a time. For example, what happens when we witness a sudden change of temperature? What happens if we try to look upon an eclipse through an over-lit sky? Or, what happens when an improbable synchronicity appears between unrelated instruments?

The Episōdos will weave in exuberances of collective artistic production, quiet reflections and speculation on materials, associations yet to form in a not-so-distant future, traversals of sonic worlds, investigations into hard surfaces of infrastructure and waste, curiosities about breathtaking acts in sporting arenas, and count the “time of in-between,” a time to the next 1000 days.

Invited to Episōdos are artists, curators, cineastes, dancers, musicians,
performers and futurists among others. They will experiment in gatherings that play out unrehearsed historical propositions, risk uncertain stories, elaborate on itineraries of ideas, and listen to ecological and historical soundings from other moments.

While the exhibition of Yokohama Triennale 2020 is site- and time-specific, Episōdos will engage Yokohama in conversations with different communities of disparate temporal sites through their own means.

The Episōdos will commence in Yokohama in November 2019 with Episōdo 00 “Sharing Our Sources.” The occurrences then move to Hong Kong, to New Delhi, and to Johannesburg to initiate conversations on Discursive Justice and then unfold intensively in Yokohama during the exhibition phase of the Triennale starting early July 2020.

November 2019