The major Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata — who has participated in documentas 8 and 9 (1987-1992) and represented Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1982 — is famous for his site-specific interventions using assemblages of wooden planks, chairs, and barrels, with which he creates architectural structures that interrogate the built forms of our cities and the way in which we experience public space.

Working on the permanent tension between the powerful force of landscape and our both vulnerable and destructive civilisation, Tadashi Kawamata mentions that the human need for permanence in spite of the forces of nature has ecologically fatal consequences.

The artist has always worked on architecture, and more particularly on community spaces such as favelas, slums or shelters. For documenta 8, in 1987, he smothered the ruins of a bombed church in Kassel with lengths of timber, ivy-like, as if to counteract the effects of time. In 1991, in Ottawa and in Houston, he built structures that he called Favelas: “The idea comes from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. I was in residence (in São Paulo) close to the favela area; the police came and destroyed everything. After a week they started to rebuild, I found in this nomadic situation, this time cycle, a great influence on the idea of building and destroying while recycling the materials”. He did this again in Kassel the following year, but this time the installation was called People’s Garden. These favelas—in both their structure and their organization—gesture toward the idea of community, which is present in all of the artist’s projects.