Tokyo Festival Farm 2024 Lab Symposium
“What can we do to coexist in our differences?”

Martine Dennewald

After completing studies in dramaturgy (Leipzig, Germany) and arts management (London, UK), Martine Dennewald worked for theatres and theatre festivals in Luxembourg, Germany, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Switzerland and Austria. She then joined Niels Ewerbeck for a few years as dramaturg at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt. Between 2015 and 2020, she was the artistic director of Festival Theaterformen – an eleven-day performing arts festival which takes place alternately in the cities of Hanover and Braunschweig (Germany). Since mid-June 2021 Martine Dennewald co-directs Festival TransAmériques in Montreal (Canada) together with Jessie Mill.

River Lin

Working with Live Art, dance, and queer culture, Paris-based Taiwanese artist River Lin is Curator of the Taipei Arts Festival, ADAM, Camping Asia and Curatoké: Performance Curator Academy at the Taipei Performing Arts Center. He is also Co-Curator of the Indonesian Dance Festival, Guest-Curator of the 2025 Biennale de la Danse de Lyon, and Guest Co-Editor for the 2024 OnCurating's Special Issue.

Toshiki Okada

Toshiki Okada is a playwright, novelist, and the director of theater company chelfitsch. His 2005 play Five Days in March won the 49th Kishida Kunio Drama Award. This work marked Okada’s international debut with chelfitsch in 2007, and he has since showcased his work in over 90 cities worldwide. He actively collaborates with artists from various different fields, including musicians, visual artists, dancers, and rappers. He continues to broaden his creative activities, directing the opera Yuzuru in 2021, and directing and writing for the 2023 Kinoshita-Kabuki Sakurahime Azuma no Bunsho (The Scarlet Princess of Edo).

farid rakun (ruangrupa)

Trained as an architect (B.Arch from Universitas Indonesia and M.Arch from Cranbrook Academy of Art), farid rakun wears different hats dependent on who is asking. He is a part of the artists’ collective ruangrupa with whom he co-curated TRANSaction: Sonsbeek 2016 in Arnhem NL and provided a collective Artistic Direction for documenta fifteen (Kassel, 2022).

[ruangrupa]
ruangrupa is a Jakarta-based collective established in 2000. It is a non-profit organization that strives to support the idea of art within urban and cultural context by involving artists and other disciplines such as social sciences, politics, technology, media, etc, to give critical observation and views towards Indonesian urban contemporary issues. ruangrupa also produce collaborative works in the form of art projects such as exhibition, festival, art lab, workshop, research, as well as book, magazine and online-journal publication.
As an artists’ collective, ruangrupa has been involved in many collaborative and exchange projects, including participating in big exhibitions such as Gwangju Biennale (2002 & 2018), Istanbul Biennial (2005), Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane, 2012), Singapore Biennale (2011), São Paulo Biennial (2014), Aichi Triennale (Nagoya, 2016) and Cosmopolis at Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2017). In 2016, ruangrupa curated TRANSaction: Sonsbeek 2016 in Arnhem, NL.
From 2015-18, ruangrupa co-developed a cultural platform Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem together with several artists’ collectives in Jakarta, located at Gudang Sarinah warehouse, Pancoran, South Jakarta. It is a cross-disciplinary space that aims to maintain, cultivate and establish an integrated support system for creative talents, diverse communities, and various institutions. It also aspires to be able to make connections and collaborate, to share knowledge and ideas, as well as to encourage critical thinking, creativity, and innovations. The results of these joint collaborations are open for public access—and presented with various exhibitions, festivals, workshops, discussions, film screenings, music concerts, and publications of journals.
In 2018, learning from their experience establishing Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem and together with Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara, ruangrupa co-initiated GUDSKUL: contemporary art collective and ecosystem studies (or Gudskul, in short, pronounced similarly like “good school” in English). It is a public learning space established to practice an expanded understanding of collective values, such as equality, sharing, solidarity, friendship and togetherness.

Kanoko Tamura

Kanoko Tamura is the director of Art Translators Collective. She works in a range of fields, including Japanese and English interpretation and translation, as well as communication design. Exploring the possibilities of translation as a mediator between people, cultures, and languages, she facilitates creative approaches to dialogue that suit the needs of each space. As an adjunct instructor in the Global Art Practice department of the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts, she teaches English and communication to artists. She was also Director of Communication Design at the Sapporo International Art Festival 2020, where she mediated between the exhibition and the audience. She is a member of the non-profit organization Art Commons Tokyo. https://art-translators.com/