It is the time of the year for FUTURES Conversations! These are a series of professional meetings between FUTURES selected artists and professionals in the photography field. Curators, artists, editors, gallerists, publishers, and writers will be there to discuss what FUTURES artists need to know from them: advice for a project, research suggestions, business orientation, writing skills, grants application advice, etc. The conversations take place every year online and offline during the annual event.
Join us for a talk and workshop with Michał Sita & Anna Pilawska-Sita, presenting their research The Ontologies of Space – Case Studies of Jeju.
"Recently, thanks to an invitation from the Jeju Museum of Art, we've been working together in South Korea, exploring the tensions embedded in the landscape of Jeju island. Our first focus point was on military structures from the Japanese colonial period—bunkers built deep into volcanic hills. While the surrounding environment may seem largely untouched, these bunkers continue to subtly transform it, bending it to the logic of warfare. Hills become networks of fortresses; forests turn into camouflage. The ecosystem itself becomes part of the military infrastructure, just like the concrete walls and underground corridors. This idea—that architecture acts as a device reshaping what a landscape is and can be—was at the core of the work we presented at the Jeju Biennale last year. We examined the lingering power and impact of postcolonial architecture.
In 2025, we had another opportunity to work in Jeju, focusing on another kind of transformation: the tensions between nature and golf infrastructure, which is widespread across the island. We asked ourselves: what happens to "nature" when it’s shaped by the logic of large-scale country club developments?
Alongside our artistic work, we also conducted a curatorial survey, researching the practices of artists engaged with nature–landscape relationships in Jeju. The process provided us with an understanding of the artistic practices in Jeju that seek to identify the norms guiding usage of space and nature, or propose subversive strategies for defining and acting upon the natural environment.
The open studio will provide us with an opportunity to test the way we revisited the materials we've gathered. During the residency we’ve been working to deepen our collaboration with Korean artists—trying to develop an infrastructure that will enable confronting multiple existing perspectives on the ontology of nature and space in Jeju, and testing new ones."
Event Details:
- 16:30 – Workshop
- 17:30 – Open studio starts
- 18:30 – Talk
- Studio Open Until: 20:00
- Location: FUTURES Photography Hub, Isaac Titsinghkade 6A, B, 1018 CA Amsterdam
⛳️ RSPV HERE
About the workshop:
We can think about the environment through various perspectives, each specific to different organisms or objects. Sometimes, a simple shift in perspective or in how we engage with our surroundings is enough for a landscape to take on new meanings, aligned with a parallel logic. This is precisely how artists working in recent years on the Korean island of Jeju have attempted to rethink their relationship with space — observing it from peripheral positions — through the lens of palm trees, weeds, or historically charged sites of violence. Such exercises in situated awareness have allowed hidden tensions in the relationships between humans, the environment, and the history of a place to surface. We, too, followed this path. We observed how the operation of golf courses on Jeju affects the nature and landscape. Golf has the ability to subject vast areas to the rules of the game, its aesthetics, and the logic of movement characteristic of the sport.
But what practical consequences arise from a shift in how we understand space, if we begin to define it according to the rules of golf? What, for example, will happen to the Futures Hub space if we subordinate it to the logic of a golf ball? During the workshops, we will try to explore this by making provisional changes and adaptations that will allow us to create a functional practice area for golf.
The opening is part of FUTURES X MPB residency, supported by MPB, the largest global platform to buy, sell and trade used photo and video kit.
Supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst (AFK).
© Michał Sita
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