“If the Snake” is the title of the second edition of the Okayama Art Summit that, after the first direction by Liam Gillik in 2016, calls another international artist in the role of director. This time Pierre Hyughe was chosen to use the metaphor of the snake, suspending its action with an ‘if’ and declaring an interruption of the language as we know it.

In fact, in his works Huyghe has for some time warned us that the human condition is not necessarily privileged, but is the only one that we can conceive at an existential level even by observing different entities and intelligent forms of life.

The snake seems to be a visceral energy that, moving sinuously, will take shape in the city of Okayama in Western Japan. The former Uchisange elementary school, the Tenjinyama Cultural Plaza, the Oriental Museum, Okayama Castle and the Hayashibara Art Museum are some of the locations where the snake will move and change its skin.

Among the artists called upon to shape this transformation, the link seems to be the relationship between the material and ephemeral dimensions of life. Behaviour, change, relations, liminal states, continuity and discontinuity, evolution, memory, knowledge are some of the instances put in place individually by fifteen artists, two couples and an editorial platform for research, called by the artist Pierre Huyghe to create new languages that can complete the mysterious action of the snake.