The distributive agency of the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale

This article proposes to understand the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in Niigata, Japan through new materialist language of assemblage and agency. To see the festival itself as an agentic assemblage reveals the complex intertwining of material and human agencies − a materially inclusive community − from which art emerges. The article examines the Japanese satoyama landscape of the festival as part of its distributive agency and examines particular festival projects that make visible the entanglement of environmental history and cultural practices.