Florie Berger.
There’s something quietly radical about showing up to a centuries-old French champagne house with salvaged timber and no fixed plan. But that is, in essence, how Tadashi Kawamata has always worked and why Maison Ruinart came looking for him.
The Japanese artist, born in Hokkaidō in 1953 and now splitting his time between Tokyo and Paris, has spent decades placing his structures in the spaces between things: between buildings and sky, between human made and overgrown, between the intentional and the local. His belvederes, walkways and shelter accumulations of reclaimed wood have appeared at the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Centre Pompidou and the Serpentine Gallery. However, they’ve never quite belonged to those institutions. They occupy the threshold. They grow into corners and climb facades.
It’s perhaps fitting then, that we find his work here in Berlin this week. A city that has always understood the aesthetic and philosophical weight of in-between spaces, as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin, where Ruinart is presenting his ‘Conversations with Nature’ collaboration. The project connects France, Japan and Germany in ways that feel less orchestrated than simply right: three countries, three distinct relationships to ecological consciousness and contemporary art.
Florie Berger.
Kawamata doesn’t begin with a concept, but with a study: drawings, loose and layered and once on site everything changes. He described this process during a recent panel talk during the opening at Palais de Tokyo – the sketches are a way of thinking, not a blueprint. Materials dictate the final form. If the wood runs out, the work is finished. It’s an ecology of working.
That distinction matters. When Kawamata was first accumulating discarded materials on New York streets in the 1980s, he recalls those years with something like nostalgia for their raw momentum, comparing himself to a kind of urban graffiti artist responding to the city’s relentless energy. He wasn’t making environmental art. He was making art from what was available. What’s changed is the world’s context for understanding it.
Florie Berger.
Fabien Vallérian, International Art & Culture Director at Maison Ruinart, who sat with us at the press opening in Paris, puts it plainly: “Back in the 80s, he started using reclaimed materials, but it didn’t carry this particular meaning, ecology simply wasn’t a priority in the same way. Now, a new generation looks at those same works completely differently, because they bring their own investment in these questions. Kawamata has become, in some ways, a pioneer of this conversation, even though it was never his explicit intention.”
This is one of the more interesting tensions inside ‘Conversations with Nature’ as a programme: the gap between an artist’s original impulse and the significance that accumulates around it over time. Kawamata’s work has always been about building something beautiful and impermanent in a site that will outlast it. The world caught up with that instinct, and gave it an urgency he didn’t ask for.
When artists are invited into the Ruinart world for the first time, Vallérian describes a process that is genuinely open. The initial visit to the Maison in Reims takes around a day and a half: vineyards, the people tending them, the surrounding forest, the historic chalk cellars, the sculpted gardens. Then both sides pause and sit with the question of whether there’s a real fit.
Often, artists return. Some spend days with a beekeeper, or a specialist in the region’s biology, or with the cellar master. Some want to go deeper into the forest. The invitation, Vallérian explains, is truly open: “It’s carte blanche, and what matters most is the element of surprise, for us and for the viewer.”
Florie Berger.
For Kawamata, that initial encounter with Reims left something specific behind. The morning mist sitting on the vines. The sound of wind through leaves. A landscape full of creatures mostly invisible to those passing through. He took that sensory impression home and made drawings from it. Those drawings eventually grew into three permanent installations now standing at 4 Rue des Crayères, the Maison’s historic address in the Champagne region: Tree Hut, Nest and Observatory. Each one is a refuge, structures that ask you to look more carefully at what surrounds them.
One of the questions Kawamata keeps returning to in his work, and in conversation is how something can be both spectacular and minimal at the same time. His answer, typically, is: through scale and placement. When you are five metres above the ground, he has said, the world is not the same. You feel the wind differently. You hear things you’d otherwise miss.
Vallérian, describing his first encounter with Kawamata’s work, reaches for a similar language. “It’s almost organic, it seems to grow by itself, like something that appeared rather than was built. There’s a quality almost of a parasite, in the most interesting sense. And it won’t stay forever.” That impermanence is part of what makes it so compelling. The nest on the exterior of the Palais de Tokyo, an outdoor installation extended through September, shifts the way people look at the building’s concrete mass. It draws the eye to a corner they would never have noticed. “It shows that even a building like the Palais de Tokyo can serve as a kind of pioneer connection point with nature.”
Florie Berger.
What Kawamata doesn’t do is invade. Nothing is built in a way that damages what it touches. All can be removed without trace. In a world where we are reckoning what we build, what we leave behind, what we owe the places we live in, there is something quietly honorable about that restraint. Practical and honorable, to use Kawamata’s own framing.
When asked whether Kawamata might be described as a kind of wood anthropologist, someone studying the relationship between humans, materials, and the built world, Vallérian considers it, then gently redirects: “For me, he’s more of a craftsman. This isn’t just making a drawing. He chooses the location because it gives perspective. It changes how we read a landscape.” But he doesn’t entirely dismiss the anthropological reading either. Kawamata has worked in prisons. He has worked with homeless communities. His practice has always had a social dimension, a rootedness in how people actually inhabit spaces, not how spaces are supposed to be inhabited.
His move to Europe after those early New York years brought a kind of relief. He has spoken about feeling more accepted here, less pressured to constantly produce and present, given more room to work.
Florie Berger.
This year’s collaboration with Ruinart also marks a new formal experiment for him: a large interior tornado structure built from wood. Kawamata describes it as something he had envisioned for years before this project made it possible. The interior placement was necessary, its core construction is too intricate for the elements, but there’s an additional poetry to that: a force of nature, rendered in reclaimed material.
Vallérian is thoughtful on the question of what it means to frame ecological narratives within a luxury context, whether something is necessarily lost when the political becomes the poetic. His answer is less a deflection than a pragmatic honesty. “As a company, we don’t have that much impact when we say these things directly to our audience. But when an artist says it, through their work, through their commitment, the volume of the message changes completely.”
That’s why the reach matters too. Ruinart partners with 35 art fairs globally, where they give these collaborations an audience that extends beyond the Maison itself. Sketches, models and selected works travel with the programme where they meet viewers in cities all over the world, highlighting questions and raising awareness on ecology, impermanence, our relationship to the materials we use and the land in their own local contexts.
During Gallery Weekend Berlin 1-3 May, that feels especially resonant. This is a city that has rebuilt itself from ruins more than once, a city that understands in its bones what it means for structures to appear and disappear and leave something behind in the air of a place even after they’re gone.
Tadashi Kawamata’s ‘Conversations with Nature’ for Maison Ruinart will be presented as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin. Three permanent installations: Tree Hut, Nest and Observatory remain on view at 4 Rue des Crayères, Reims. The outdoor nest at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, continues through September.
Find out more here.
photography. courtesy of Florie Berger
words. Dave Lantinga
