A fluid, roving community of like-minded artist, carpenters, designers, and musicians, Cinema Caravan and Takashi Kuribayashi ask viewers to reconsider their perceptions of nature and their place in it. In Kassel, they are presenting a large, mobile space made out of mosquito nets, drawing audiences into an evolving net as it drifts around the city.

Conviviality is a from of consciousness raising for Cinema Caravan and artist Takashi Kuribayashi. A fluid roving community of like-minded artists, carpenters, designers, and musicians, as well as cooks and surfers, the collectives has produced open-air cinemas for venues ranging from natural sites, to festivals and art events. Since graduating from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2002, Kuribayashi, who is now based between Japan and Yogyakarta, Indonesia, has made a career of producing large-scale installations that invert as a mechanism for viewers to reconsider their perceptions of the world and their place in it.

Both Cinema Caravan and Takashi Kuribayashi are united in their long-standing concern for ecology and energy issues—a concern that was only heightened after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and concomitant Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 11,2011. Their work encourages visitors to immerse themselves into problems that can often feel remote or hard to visualize, such as the effects of radioactive contamination on the environment, while also taking time to recharge themselves spiritually.

In Kassel, the artist are driven by the motto “make friends not art” Building on previous works, such as Kuribayashi’s Genki-Ro installation (2021), a functioning herbal steam sauna modeled on the Fukushima reactors.

The choice of material is inspired by the Japanese idiom ‘kaya no soto’ or ‘out of mosquito net’

which corresponds in usage to the English “out of the loop” Instead of practicing exclusion, the project invites unforeseen audiences into the mosquito net and evolves in dialogue with local contributors as it drifts around Kassel.

Exemplifying the lumbung sprit informing  documenta fifteen, Cinema Caravan and Takashi Kuribayashi’s projects cumulatively point to the caravan as a model of community where individuals retain their autonomy while each contributing in their own way to an unfolding experience of togetherness.