The festival's reverberations have dissolved into Nakanojo's mountain valleys, transforming into the pulse of a new season. We close the great circle of the 10th edition. Taking its accumulated energy as sustenance, we step forward into unknown territory extending toward the next decade and beyond. From this soil that twenty years have cultivated, fresh shoots of expression are emerging once again.

As we embark on this new chapter, the guidepost we raise for our journey ahead is William Blake's poem "The Echoing Green," which the 18th-century poet and painter included in his collection "Songs of Innocence." When we reflect upon it, our path has always been a quest for utopia. For the 9th edition, our theme was Sebastian Münster's "Cosmographia." We overlaid the act of following unseen paths with the creative activities of artists. At the end of those footsteps toward unmapped places, we arrived at the paradise of the 10th edition: "Mountain of Light." There, beyond the glow of former industries like sericulture and iron ore mining, artists rendered a vivid landscape of a "new world" that spread before us.

In 2027, "The Echoing Green" deepens our previous explorations and attempts to manifest in Nakanojo the world of innocence that Blake imagined. In Blake's green, the sun rises, festive bells bless the spring, and children's innocent cries of joy race across the green field. Beside them, under the aged oak tree, the elderly gently smile as they see their former selves reflected in the children.

The moment is vividly portrayed: the past embodied in the elderly and the future embodied in the children intersect on the same green. Fading memories and hopes yet to be born join hands in miraculous resonance, sharing the same present time and the same earthen space. The souls of those who once loved this land, cultivated it, and eventually returned to the soil. The children who begin their new games upon that soil. This "cycle of life," repeated by Nakanojo's land for thousands of years, is what we have chosen as this year's theme: "Echoing Green."

In this theme, the green we employ symbolically is the vast land of Nakanojo itself and the fertile soil of the community living there. We have imbued the color green with the prayer for regeneration that sprouts after harsh winters, the ceaselessly repeating cycle of rebirth, and the meaning of life's activities passing down through generations. The great circle of the 10th edition closes, and now a new life, the 11th edition, is beginning to bud forth. Death is not an ending but a silence that nurtures the next life. This green of community, nourished by memories of the past, holds deeper and more vivid greenness as it awaits the future.

The works that artists release are the echo that makes this vast green tremble and visualizes the chain of life. Art is never an isolated point but an urgent call sent forth toward the green of community. Artists listen intently to the voice of the land and gather up an echo. This is the work itself that they create, filling the space as a lingering reverberation.

The 11th Nakanojo Biennale is a festival for connecting the baton handed down from the past to the next generation and making it resound into the future. The sun rises, the green shines, and eventually shadows lengthen and night arrives. Yet even in that darkness, the echo continues faintly without pause, quietly awaiting the next generation's dawn. Endings always carry beginnings within them, and the resonance left by a single creator will surely become the force that makes something new sprout.

Just as we see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, we seek to perceive from this single green of Nakanojo the great cycle of life and the innocent utopia that Blake dreamed of. In this place where past and future, the elderly and children, life and death intersect upon a single green, please join us as one precious echo. When our voices overlap and resonate together, Nakanojo's green will surely be dyed in multilayered, eternal greenness unlike any before.

In this place where the succession of new life begins, we look forward with all our hearts to exchanging the resonance of creation with you once again.