Artists under the same sky: Adrián Villar Rojas and Silvia Rivas shine at the Aichi Triennale

An abandoned school is the most dystopian setting Adrián Villar Rojas has worked on to date. It's located in Seto City, a small city on the outskirts of Nagoya, Japan. Along with 61 other artists from 23 countries, the Rosario-born artist dazzles at the 6th Aichi Triennale, a mega avant-garde festival named after one of the country's five prefectures or regions. Half a million visitors are expected from Saturday, September 13th to November 30th.

Among the artists who arrived from around the world, there is a strong presence of Japanese, Arab, and South Pacific artists, but also more Latin Americans: from Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico, in addition to the Argentine Silvia Rivas . Only a handful of Americans, including the prominent sculptor Simone Leigh , the first African American to represent her country at the Venice Biennale.

After a previous edition curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Triennial takes on the theme that this dark period left for contemporary art as its focus: reflecting on the relationship between humans and our environment . "Contemplating the world between the ashes and the roses," according to Sheika Hoor Al Qasimi , the festival's artistic director.

The artists do so through video installations, monumental sculptures and large paintings in exhibition venues such as the Aichi Art Center – the festival’s main venue in the heart of Nagoya – as well as in unusual locations: a café run by the celebrated Michael Rakowitz , a clay quarry that Australian Robert Andrew draws on , and an old public bath or sentō, which functions as a space for community cleansing and exchange.

Here, nearly 20,000 kilometers from Argentina, a platform has been established with artists from around the world, with very diverse backgrounds and histories, working in solidarity . The works commissioned by the Triennial take the form of collaborations between artists or work with local communities : art students, families, entrepreneurs.

The rainy season makes everything even more desolate. A steep street surrounded by overgrown grass leads to Fukagawa Elementary School, which closed eight years ago because there were no longer enough children for its spacious, well-lit classrooms. It was there that Adrián Villar Rojas brought his astonishing installation Terrestrial Poems (2025): a skin of printed paper that covers every corner of this building , with a powerful, political message. The images display a sample of the sapiens we know throughout human history, in narratives that range from destruction to evolution. Explosions, new beginnings, striking colors, and images of protest.

"It's basically a discussion about the tensions that arise when we recreate our past, and also our future, in different human families, primarily Homo sapiens," Villar Rojas told the international press. The artist has just arrived from Korea, where his exhibition , The Language of the Enemy, is located in the central hall of the Art Sonje cultural center.

For two and a half months, a group of 12 people from Argentina worked to remove furniture and some walls, making subtle changes for an "architectural intervention." There are bookshelves, large darkened windows, and bathrooms . They then worked according to the 3D model of the space created remotely by the artist.

“Creating and rebuilding is an extremely political thing, which has also changed: it's only been about 200 years since humans became aware that the planet is millions and millions of years old and has been inhabited by different cultures,” he notes.

On that wall is a sphere, a fire; it faces a sort of aftermath of the fire, in ashes, half-destroyed. Overlaid, worn, torn, these papers have covered stairs, windows, and mirrors, revealing the marks of the conflict . "The process is also a way of expressing the internal discussion within this group, a fiction about what would happen if some people slept in this school and created a kind of cave..."

In this conflict of representations and meanings , the "urban interferences" of Graciela Sacco , a guest artist on this ambitious project, appear among the wall papers. They occupy, in fact, the central space of the wall that greets visitors from the front.

The mouths from the Bocanada series, the images from Combate perpetuo , Un lugar bajo el sol , among others, participate thanks to the estate of the artist, also from Rosario, who died in 2017. Villar Rojas highlights her role as an educator.

"I come from Argentina, where we still have a very solid public education system. Public high schools and universities are spaces for debate, and there's a political debate going on right now."

At the Aichi Art Center, a 12-story mega-cultural center in the heart of Nagoya, in addition to a concert hall where the opening ceremony took place with the artists in attendance, rooms on different levels display previously unseen works with the aim of going beyond differences and borders and discovering different perspectives.

In the double-height open space at the entrance, you can see a huge blue tapestry based on the typical construction tarps used in this country. It's a favorite material of Hiroko Kubo, born in Hiroshima, who, through folk-style creatures presented as monsters, brings a reflection on the 80 years since the atomic bomb , with connections to today's world. "I think this exhibition is also a reminder that we all live under the same sky and are connected in all our problems, that there is always a root cause, which is colonialism and the occupation that is present," Hoor Al Qasimi stated at the press conference.

At the entrance to the exhibition halls, in a glass-enclosed hallway overlooking some flowerbeds, Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou displayed a moving installation: for months he cultivated a rose garden , like those in the festival's image, but with a variety no longer available on the market. Obsolete, extinct, discarded roses reveal a relationship between the human and the natural, while also drawing attention to the flower market as an industry.

An entire room is dedicated to Zumbido Dynamics , a video installation by Silvia Rivas that draws attention from the entrance due to the quality of the sound achieved in this installation, using the latest technology. A swarm of flies fills the screen as it would anywhere on the planet; hence its universal character.

“Although I see different series of my work as strongly influenced by context or moment—there is life and death, beauty and what remains, decay—I try to generate experiential associations, so that the viewer feels as though they were there,” the artist tells Clarín about the core of her work: time and the perception of time associated with sensations. “I work with the stretching of an instant, and that stretching has to do with situations of resistance, of condemnation.”

As a response to a catastrophic situation, Lebanese artist Dala Nasser built a Noah's Ark out of wood, cement, ropes, nets, and stacked bags... and a huge cement snake surrounding it, with a science-fiction aesthetic. A triangular row of ropes hanging from above emulates a head of hair, inviting you to enter: inside is a display case containing the hair of Abu Dhabi artist Afra Al DHaheri . While in art school, she worked as a hairdresser to support her studies.

The beautiful nature paintings of Sudanese artist Kamala Ibrahim Ishag are striking; while Japanese artist Yuriko Asano takes up the ever-present Japanese obsession with food in collaboration with different communities; Mayunkiki recreates the story of her family and the Nakano train in a sound installation; and the Palestinian duo

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme present the fear of territorial loss in a poetic and bold video installation.

Using crochet and collaborating with hundreds of women for nearly a year, Indonesian artist Mulyana creates a truly underwater ecosystem that fuses craftsmanship and contemporary art, focusing on environmental issues and recycled materials, across several rooms and hallways.

Visitors throw themselves to the floor in the room by Iraqi artist Bassim Al Shaker. In addition to large abstract canvases on the walls, a painting hanging from the ceiling reveals the Baghdad sky filled with fireworks or hit by bombs .

In its sixth edition, the Triennial was conceived in collaboration with Seto City, a mountaintop enclave that houses the ceramics quarry that has made it a hub for the ceramics industry and artistic practice.

Aichi has its own Ceramics Museum , halfway between Nagoya, and displays enormous works by Simon Leigh , Peruvian Elena Damiani, Saijo Akane 's fantastic installation of organic ceramics in a shag-carpeted space, Wangechi Mutu , with an openly feminist statement, and Guatemalan Marilyn Boror Bor, among others.

In addition to Villar Rojas' intervention, the compact city showcases projects developed in conjunction with the community, such as the gigantic mural by Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas , which explores the links between Asia and Latin America, which have been underestimated until now and are experiencing a boom in academic studies.

Avant-garde contemporary art poses cultural and political challenges that take shape here in an orderly and still somewhat conservative city . An intensive educational program aims to strengthen the loyalty of visitors, mostly Japanese, by engaging with the conflicts that contemporary art neither wants nor can evade.

Each week until its conclusion, the Aichi Triennale also offers an exclusive program of performances —another trend in current art—including a company made up of people with disabilities. Another, with the piece "Paradise Rumor ," explores the deception hidden in the paradisiacal conception of the Pacific Islands, right here, 20,000 kilometers from Buenos Aires.