Whalefall: News and Rumours from the Ocean Floor

The Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale announces the concept of the 9th Yokohama Triennale, conceived by the Artistic Directors Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero.

This edition begins with two biological phenomena and figures of the ocean, which are also alluded to in Japanese folk tales. The oarfish, a creature of the deep, is known in Japan as the messenger from Ryūgū, the dragon palace at the bottom of the sea. When it rises to the surface, it has long been seen as foretelling impending disasters. Once a whale dies, its body moves in the opposite direction, sinking to the ocean floor and becoming the origin of an entire ecosystem that nourishes life for many generations to come. A whale fall. In a contemporary world that appears to be sinking under the weight of various crises, this transformation, which sees death as a beginning and the endings of empires as future promises, is the central metaphor of the 9th Yokohama Triennale.

Much of the anxiety of our time presumes the spectre of a monster that would eat humanity and the world. And yet what if humanity could devour this monster instead, and overcome these fears? To reverse the disaster narratives that work on the same axis as the narratives of progress, instead of looking upward, along the tree of life inside Okamoto Tarō’s Tower of the Sun built for Expo ’70 in Osaka, with humans at its summit, the Triennale looks down, to find hope in the dark and teeming depths, in a collective digestion. Still, a cold fear remains: what if the whale fall does not in fact give birth to anything better, and the skeleton remains inert and sterile? And what will remain on the floor where this collective body eventually goes down?

What the oarfish carries up from the depths is news and rumours, and the Triennale follows it through a series of episodes in the history of communication, each a revolution in the circulation of ideas and each its own laboratory of deception. The Manila Galleon, which crossed the Pacific for two and a half centuries, was one crucial link in a worldwide intelligence network maintained by Catholic religious orders, an early cybernetic globalisation through which the distorted accounts that the missionaries gave of the Christians executed in Nagasaki in 1597 spread to the Americas and beyond as engineered ragebait. The telegraph and the panorama were the media of nationalism and empire, with the telegraph collapsing time and distance as it carried false dispatches, and the panorama manufacturing consent by turning imperial spectacle into collective reality. The first telegraph wire in Japan was strung in Yokohama in 1869, in the years of the transatlantic cable and the Suez Canal, so that Japan’s opening to the world was not so much an exception as almost simultaneous with the world opening to itself. The whale had been fuel for that opening, its oil lighting the nineteenth century and lubricating its machines, and the hunt for it bringing the American ships that forced Japan to open. Japan’s current opening, with migrants and tourists arriving in unprecedented numbers, receives no such loud affirmation, perhaps because the world is no longer in a moment of celebrating openings. Today’s internet, social media and AI are virtual data worlds grounded in undersea cables colonised by marine organisms, nature and information irreversibly entangled, with AI as the ultimate deception, less a vision of the future than a digestion of the past that forecloses the new.

Yokohama, opened to the world on the cusp of the Meiji era, anchors the stories the Triennale traces. Through an architectural intervention commissioned for this edition, the Yokohama Museum of Art, designed by Tange Kenzō, becomes the body of the whale, its atrium the thoracic cavity, or perhaps the hull of a ship, within which artistic practices rooted in different genealogies gather and new worlds grow from the ocean floor.