MARIANA FERNÁNDEZ:
It’s such a pleasure to be in conversation with the two of you about AIR and the curatorial ideas that shaped this year’s iteration. Let’s begin with the ideas of gathering and exchange. Bringing people together from different disciplines has been a driving impetus of AIR from the beginning. It’s also deeply embedded in Aspen itself, which has a long history as a site of interdisciplinary exchange, going back to the Aspen International Design Conference in 1951.
DANIEL MERRITT:
Whenever you do anything in Aspen, you have to consider the location and the history attached to it. Aspen’s legacy is built on an interdisciplinary way of thinking—the intersections of design, literature, film. It’s long been a place of cultural mixing.
For the Museum, it’s important to draw on that history while also transforming it for the present. In many ways, that’s what AIR is trying to do. It’s also why Nicola [Lees, Nancy and Bob Magoon Artistic Director and CEO of Aspen Art Museum] felt Aspen was the right context for this project. And having an artist-founded, non-collecting museum as the nucleus of this activity makes sense—it allows us to think about how institutions that don’t collect can best serve the public and contribute to broader discourse in the field.
MF: Could you talk about the transition from last year’s AIR into this one?
VIC BROOKS:
Last year’s program began with a three-day retreat with artists—not just visual artists, but performers, filmmakers, and writers, alongside technologists, scientists, and psychoanalysts—which we moderated with the retreat working group: Aria Dean, Paul Chan, Zoë Hitzig, Evan Calder Williams, and Anisa Jackson. It was kind of a test case to see what conversations might emerge. It’s amazing to see how many participants who met at the retreat are now collaborating or in close conversation.
AIR was conceived as a ten-year-long project in which each year’s program builds on the one before it, ideally developing both a community and a set of ideas over time—thinking not just about the present moment, but also taking a longer historical view and projecting that into the future. Last year, the central questions were about the role of art at a moment when technology is outpacing human comprehension. How can art help us navigate new ways of being? What does art do to our perception—how does it make meaning, engage the senses, and help us see and feel differently?
This year, we’ve been thinking more about the act of mediation itself. The way Paul Chan describes it, which I think is really beautiful, is that art can help us be vigilant, it can teach us ways to move through a world we increasingly might not recognize. Aspen, of course, is a highly mediated place—through images of leisure, tourism, and “wilderness,” which is itself a complicated category. It’s a landscape layered with histories, from the Northern Ute to the extraction of Western expansionism to the present, and it’s imagined differently depending on who you are: If you’re a designer or scholar, the image that comes to mind is the Aspen International Design Conference. If you’re someone from an older generation or interested in counterculture, you might know Aspen via Hunter S. Thompson. If you’re a skier or hiker . . . and so on. Each person brings their own frame of reference, just as they do when encountering an artwork. So, we’ve been thinking about Aspen in and of itself as a kind of dramaturgical field.
DM: I often think about Aspen from a bird’s-eye view—partly because of how the mountains structure movement. Something that’s ten miles away can take hours to reach. That aerial perspective allows you to take in both the terrain and the cultural density of this unique, very charged pocket of the world. Coming out of last year, we asked: What is AIR? What do we want it to become? This year, we wanted to create space within the program to reflect on that alongside artists—to take stock and process what this endeavor might actually be.
I also want to foreground that this is the first year where an exhibition really forms a cornerstone of the artistic program of AIR. The central component of Adrián Villar Rojas’s exhibition is a massive fictive cave that lives within one of the lower-level galleries of the Museum. It’s a strange chimera of scans of real caves coalescing into this impossible form that he and his studio are currently working on in New Jersey.
With an eye toward a long historical view, a vital jumping-off point for our conception of AIR harnesses the symbolic power of the cave as a primordial site for humans making meaning through paintings of people and animals in landscape painted on landscape, onto the walls of these environments. These early efforts to make sense of the world through intervening in it is what we really want to center across the program.
MF: One thing that stands out is the iterative nature of AIR. The nature of an interdisciplinary cohort building and expanding over time feels distinct from other festival models. Are there relationships or threads from last year that are manifesting this year?
VB: That’s really at the heart of this endeavor in many ways. There are both direct and indirect continuities. For example, Matthew Barney created a site-specific performance last year for a former drill hall now used as a working cattle ranch. It included a central object, a prop called the “zone tool,” which was always intended to become a sculpture. That will now be installed close to the original performance site.
We also have several of our retreat members from last year returning to be “onstage,” so to speak. Lucy Raven is adapting her moving image installation Murderers Bar in the mountains with a new score by Deantoni Parks.
At the same time, with the idea of AIR really investing in artists’ practices over longer periods than just the single year we have to organize an edition, we’re co-commissioning Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, whose collaborative practice is called Sweat Variant. They were both at the retreat last year, and they’re developing a new performance, adaku part 2, which will happen here in 2027.
DM: Similarly, we welcomed Jamieson Webster and P. Staff last year to speak about death and afterlives. This year, we’re continuing our psychoanalytic explorations with Nuar Alsadir, who will be reflecting on her book Animal Joy and the mechanisms of comedy and laughter.
We’re also working with Morgan Bassichis on a performance-lecture about the role of ghosts and specters and spirits within their performance practice. From Frank Maya, a comedian who Morgan invoked in their play Can I Be Frank? at the SoHo Playhouse last summer, to Amy Winehouse, a figure they’re currently engaging with in what will likely be a new kind of concert with a five-piece band. This is an opportunity to work with someone on projects that may not yet be fully resolved, but AIR gives space for them to develop over time.
AIR is designed to be porous. It’s not just a container; it’s a driver. Whether artists are working with a kernel of an idea or something fully formed, it allows us to meet artists where they are and place all of these things in conversation with each other.
MF: How does this year’s title function as a frame?
VB: The interesting thing about titling this edition Figures in a Landscape is that it really does reflect an interdisciplinary view. Coming back to the question of mediation, of how landscapes are framed by inherited ways of seeing, the title also conjures different images or cultural references for different people—from a painting or a poem to the movie that, Daniel, you brought up and that became our first point of entry to the title. Do you want to talk a bit about that?
DM: Yes, Joseph Losey’s Figures in a Landscape (1970), which was included in Lucy Raven’s film program at the Barbican Centre in 2025. From the moment the film begins, you’re brought into a bird’s-eye view of a mysterious landscape, with two figures being chased by a helicopter. The paranoid sentiments which live in that film are perhaps also lurking within the title of AIR this year. That anonymity, surveillance, and hint of something slightly unsettling within a seemingly serene image was interesting to us. Anxieties around a world in which humans may become indistinguishable from artificial intelligence permeated some of the program last year, raising important questions about art’s relationship to processing, which might feel incomprehensible. This year, these considerations of staging and building new worlds within our current one, however ephemeral, feel like a way to more deeply contemplate how we navigate a world where sense is eroding rapidly.
VB: That instability is important to us—who the figure is, who is watching, and what constitutes the ground, is continually shifting. The relationship between figure and landscape remains unresolved, and that carries into how we’re thinking about “site” this year. Last year’s works were more traditionally site-specific. This year, we’re thinking more about framing—how different sites and modes of art structure experience through their histories and conventions. We’re looking to institutions whose spaces have long shaped how we gather around culture. The Wheeler Opera House, for example, carries with it the theatrical tradition of the proscenium, a very specific frontal perspective for staging narratives with a beginning and end for a fixed audience. A museum structures perception differently; it creates individual choreographies and makes meaning through the juxtaposition of objects in space. The Aspen Institute brings yet another discursive frame, the auditorium, through its history of political and intellectual discourse. And then there’s the landscape itself, this spectacular setting that’s entangled with human activity and pressures that determine who can move through it, how we access it, and the ways in which we relate to it.
So, we’ve been thinking about how the different institutional and environmental frames that Aspen offers intersect with the artists’ current interests. Camille Henrot’s new performance, for instance, draws from the Renaissance tradition of commedia dell’arte, so the Wheeler’s jewel-box theater is the obvious frame. Lucy Raven’s Murderers Bar operates differently. The film centers on the recent removal of a dam along the Klamath River. Its specific installation design of a vertical, curved sculptural screen was intended for the museum context, but here it will be presented outdoors in a high alpine meadow. It becomes a kind of landscape within a landscape—two glacial environments overlaid onto one another. It’s an adaptation that’hopefully adds to the experience of the artwork.
DM: Ivan Cheng’s work approaches site differently again. His performances are shaped by context but remain agile and adaptable. We invited him to present a filmed monologue, and, in scouting locations, we moved through all these spaces in Aspen that seem to perform their own histories—experimental schools, artist-founded centers, golf courses, even the landfill.
At the landfill especially, there was this mesmerizing choreography between workers, bulldozers, and compactors. Seeing it through Ivan’s eyes made visible these intersections between humans, machines, labor, and performance, but also the long trail of what humans leave behind. In seventy years, the landfill will be “full” and we’ll have to start hauling our trash out of the valley. What’s currently there will be buried in these mounds, small mountains of our refuse against the backdrop of centuries-old peaks. That’s one of the fascinating things about Aspen—the landscape continually provokes response.
What’s left behind and the collapse of temporal registers is central to Adrián Villar Rojas’s exhibition, where futures are depicted as ruins or relics. Encased within the “white cube” of the museum, these impossible geological artifacts assume a new type of power. In making the show, Adrián has discussed the fact that you can never really see the complete “outside” of a cave. Its exterior extends deeper into its surrounding rock, merged with the earth’s topography. But in the museum, the cave is extracted and made visible. How does one make sense of this impossibility?
VB: We’ve also been thinking about this in relation to the scholar Adrienne Mayor and her work on geomythology, which has also been highly influential on Adrián. She studies the relationships between myth and material history—how fossils, geological events, or natural disasters become transformed into stories that endure across generations.
One of the things she told us is that regular stories based on experience may last only a few generations, but stories tied to catastrophic or transformative events can persist for thousands of years; they transform into myths, and the line between fact and fiction is blurry. Myths can also emerge from encounters with material traces people couldn’t fully explain: fossils, eruptions, floods, ruins.
That has shaped how we think about Aspen and the museum itself. These institutions feel permanent, but, temporally speaking, they are incredibly recent. Eventually they too will become traces or ruins. What stories will future generations construct from the artifacts we leave behind? What kinds of narratives emerge from the remains of the present?
DM: Adrienne also spoke about narrative itself as a survival mechanism. Whether through oral history, theater, poetry, music, or exhibition-making, storytelling is one of the primary ways humans transmit knowledge and meaning across time.
That extends into the talks program as well. Through poets like Paige Lewis and Kaveh Akbar, and filmmakers like Julie Dash, we’re also thinking about psychic landscapes—interior worlds shaped by memory, spirituality, myth, and history. Julie Dash’s films, especially Daughters of the Dust (1990), are so powerful in the way they connect landscape to collective memory and ancestral presence.
MF: Music and sound are very prevalent in the program this year. How are you thinking about them in relation to these ideas around landscape?
VB: Sound transforms space in such a specific way. It touches every single surface it comes in contact with and then reflects off those surfaces, creating a sort of invisible sonic landscape that expands into the visual one. Kali Malone is performing on the newly restored pipe organ of the Aspen Chapel and, of course, a chapel is a space designed for the potential of spiritual transcendence through sound—both music and speech. Even though composed for organ, Kali’s music is going to sound different on every organ that she plays because of the design of each instrument and the specificity of how sound reflects off the architecture and reaches our ears.
We also have Los Thuthanaka performing at the top of Aspen Mountain. I mean, talk about psychoacoustics! Sound travels much farther outside and the sound field is less dense because there are fewer obstacles for it to reflect back off of. But if we think about early architectures, and certainly long before sound amplification technologies were invented, humans worked with and adapted the natural acoustics of the landscape. Geological formations, such as the mouth of a cave, can act like the bell of a horn in order for sounds to be heard across distance.
DM: This is interesting to think about in relation to what Los Thuthanaka’s early morning performance is going to sound like. Sound will travel far, with the mountains sending reflections back to us from every direction. It’s as if the mountains are an instrument in and of themselves, shaping and adding to the sonic landscape.
Landscapes are never neutral. They’re laden with symbolic and allegorical power, especially a place like Aspen, which is awe-inspiring and surreal at every turn. I’m constantly told by visiting artists that it has this simulation-like quality to it. Anything that you do in Aspen feels colored or shaped by this conditioned environment. There’s something really tempting and exciting about embracing that, because artists can approach and reckon with that complexity in a way that few others can.
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The second iteration of the Aspen Art Museum’s AIR Festival runs July 27–31, 2026. Learn more about AIR here.
