Art and Nature

Connectedness —
Experiments on a new relationship with nature

The 8th International Marianne Brandt Award 2022 asks artists and designers how that which connects us with other living beings and habitats can be newly discovered and designed. We are looking for projects, images, and texts on cooperative, aesthetic, metaphorical, and poetic exchanging relationships with other organisms and natural existences.

How could we conceive and design connecting processes, objects, and atmospheres in this sense? How can we talk, write and tell about our existential connections in poetic and creative ways?

The mythical Kodama were believed to reside beneath the shifting emerald tides of an endless sea of trees in the ancient folklore of Japan, forest deities whose forms were often indistinguishable from the woods in which they made their homes. Yet Kodama also referred to the mournful cry of these spirits which resounded through the trees, an echo that carried nature’s tidings across the breadth of space and time.

The Kodama Film Festival was conceived as a means of emulating that same sense of earthly reverberation, by finding creative voices that would meaningfully reflect the wonder of the natural world onto contemporary society.