Woodscapes_Erieta Attali on Kengo Kuma | Photography exhibition Byzantine & Christian Museum, Athens

The forthcoming Erieta Attali’s exhibition, Woodscapes | Erieta Attali on Kengo Kuma, offers a unique opportunity to explore the materiality of wood in Kengo Kuma’s ouvre through Erieta Attali’s fine art photography. Woodscapes,” which represents a visual conversation between architect Kengo Kuma and photographer Erieta Attali. Despite their different disciplines, they share a worldview where space is treated as a transient landscape. By focusing on wood as a material that highlights the ambiguity between natural and artificial environments, Attali’s work invites viewers to question their perceptions and engages them in a dialogue about the interaction between the natural and the human-made.

-text by Aris Kafantaris

Kengo Kuma & Associates, Glass House in New Canaan, USA | Photo: © Erieta Attali

Woodscapes is a visual conversation between two creators, and two disciplines. When examining the work of architect Kengo Kuma and fine art | architecture photographer Erieta Attali, one encounters a deep conceptual affinity despite their different disciplines: a worldview where space is treated as a transient landscape.

Kengo Kuma & Associates, Tottori Takahama Wooden Cafe, Tottori Prefecture, Japan | Photo: © Erieta Attali

Kuma’s quest has been to “erase architecture” not by concealing it, but by dissolving the concept of the architectural object: i.e. the media construct whose objective, visually seductive image, represents a one-way relationship towards the user and the landscape. Architecture to be looked at, as opposed to architecture to be experienced and lived in. Erieta Attali’s photographs also “erase architecture” by refusing to read it as an autonomous entity: architecture and landscape leak into each other, their limits are obscured and questioned.

Kengo Kuma & Associates, Kenzo House, Paris, France | Photo: © Erieta Attali

Attali’s photographs materialize these ideas, and embody them into a visual and spatial conversation. It is through this conversation that the viewer is invited to question their preconceptions of what is natural, what is human made, and how the two interact. Since material and its expressions are central in both Kuma’s and Attali’s visual vocabularies, this series focuses on a material that perhaps more than any other, underlines the ambiguity between our natural and artificial environments: wood.

Kengo Kuma & Associates, Bridge Minaminsariku, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan | Photo: Erieta Attali 

Wood is a protean material: alive, it spurts vertically from the dark slopes of central Japan to form cedar forests that look like limitless cathedrals of unhewn pillars. Sliced, joined, stacked and woven, it turns into filtering screens and porous envelopes that articulate Kuma’s buildings. Laminated, pressured and extruded they shape the slender columns and cantilevering beams that span ravines as bridges and form interior roofscapes like upturned ships.

And then, reflected in sheets of glazing, and glimpsed through layers of forest and shrubbery, Kuma’s wood is recomposed by Attali into a kaleidoscopic performance of continuous, reverberating space: woodscapes.

Kengo Kuma & Associates, Coeda House Cafe, Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan | Photo: © Erieta Attali

Facts & Credits

Exhibition title: Woodscapes | Erieta Attali on Kengo Kuma

Location: Byzantine & Christian Museum, Athens