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Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka Found a Blueprint for Survival in Ancestral Ways of Making

At the Venice Biennale and beyond, the Japanese Canadian artist explores what humans have lost by becoming detached from natural rhythms.

Early in his psychoanalytic inquiry, Freud pointed to the possibility that “the whole of humanity has become neurotic under the pressure of cultural urges.” A substantial body of literature addressed this concern, before and since, warning as early as the first Industrial Revolution of the dangers of the utopian drive to relentlessly technologize our lives. And this growing tension between anthropogenic and natural environments has continued to produce disturbances in human behavior and the psyche.

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Japanese Canadian artist Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka has long explored the interplays of instability, adaptation and attunement between humans and their environments. This year, her work features prominently in the main section of the Venice Biennale, taking over the Giardini entrance corridor leading to the main pavilion, and can also be found in the inaugural Maebashi Biennale and a major installation on Toronto’s new Lassonde Art Trail.

Hatanaka’s practice could hardly feel more timely. By recovering ancestral technologies and ecological wisdom, she addresses our lost environmental attunement, with pieces that serve as both repositories of embodied collective knowledge and records of the interconnected changes affecting humans and their surroundings.

“This attunement to the nature around us helps with our survival, but we’re becoming less and less attuned,” Hatanaka told Observer during the Maebashi Biennale installation. “Animals have this knowing and sensing, and if humans can be aware of animals’ behavior, then that’s the type of knowledge we’ve developed over a really long period of time.” She links many contemporary social disturbances to the conceptual separation of humans from nature: once the natural world is perceived as external to human life, it becomes far easier to exploit and damage.

Her reflection resonates with much of the literature examining how life grew increasingly artificial over the course of the 19th Century. Lewis Mumford, a leading critic of mechanization and industrialism, described this phenomenon as a shift toward “monotechnics,” brought about by the loss of a “technological pool once deeply grounded on the earth and resulting from interacting with soils, climates, plants, animals, human populations, institutions and cultures… When they were eliminated from the system of production, that vast cultural resource was wiped out.”

Hatanaka’s approach seeks to recover ancestral ways of thinking about the relationship between making and natural resources, turning her practice into a means of reattuning to nature’s cycles of creation, transformation and regeneration. Her works are made from washi, paper produced through an ancient Japanese tradition she studied in depth after returning to Japan to trace her heritage. A key moment came during a 2022-23 residency at Kashiki Seishi, a seventh-generation, family-run washi mill in Ino, Kōchi Prefecture, near the Niyodo River. There, she learned the process firsthand—from harvesting kōzo (paper mulberry) and preparing the bark to forming sheets—and worked closely with the mill’s papermakers, including master washi maker Tatsuyuki Kitaoka and Washi founder Ayumi Hamada.

The technique is rooted not only in generational tradition but in an intimate knowledge of the land and its ecology. “I’m using traditional crafts tied to the earth,” Hatanaka explained. “These are all ways in which humans have drawn from the localized environment to make something very useful but........

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