The Northern Alps Art Festival (NAAF) is a contemporary art festival held every three years in Omachi City, Nagano Prefecture, which is nestled among the 3,000-meter-high peaks of the Northern Alps.
In its third iteration, the festival emphasizes locally sourced materials and the region's cultural heritage to create large-scale installations within the scenic alpine landscape. This year's theme, water, wood, earth, sky, reflects the land's characteristics and essential community resources. With site-specific art by artists from Japan and abroad as a guidepost, visitors are invited to experience the abundance of clean, melted snow, the dignified and clear air, the rich seasonal scenery, and the culinary culture that represents the local climate.
Among the artists selected for this year’s festival is Palestinian artist Dana Awartani, who will install geometric sculptures in Omachi's natural surroundings:
In the woods of Koshiarasawazeki, an area which retains a history of utilizing the river and working as a flood-control since long ago, a geometric sculptural work inspired by the crystalline structure of salt appears. In Jordan, the home of Awartani, and along the coastline of the Dead Sea of Palestine, crystallized salt can often be seen, but this kind of rock salt does not exist as a natural resource in Japan, where solar salt was brought inland from coastal areas. The development of the region through the salt trade and the artist’s own background overlap in this work, which symbolizes the intersection of history and culture.
pine wood and paint, 275 × 275 × 275 cm
Images courtesy of the Northern Alps Festival