The online symposium, taking place over three days (May 28-30 2021), aims to gather the research, stories, and interdisciplinary perspectives behind the ‘Pollination’ project ‘Of Hunters and Gatherers’, curated by LIR and Kittima Chareeprasit in response to their working with artists Maryanto and Ruangsak Anuwatiwimon. Over the last year, as the curators walked with the […]
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Fuck Your Culture: Nudes in Four Landscapes
Can any mountains, any continent, withstand such waste? Charles Darwin, 19 March 1835, on the HMS Beagle ONTARIO I grew up in southern Ontario’s vast deciduous forest. One side of my house faced down a hill into massive swampland, the other side a glacial ridge that had been turned into a ski resort. Everywhere […]
Rumah Menapo
The Refuge of the Deer during the Floods of the Batanghari River Borju, the poet of disasters, has been making masks for several years. Since his grandparents told him how their ancestors were lepers treated as outcasts by the neighbouring villages. They were driven into the depths of a forest full of haunted ruins, a […]
Stories from the Graves in the Yard
April 2014 was nearing its end. A crisis in Jakarta became manifest in two reports in the daily newspapers, as well as some readers’ letters in response. Kompas, the biggest daily in Indonesia, published a letter on the 28th, titled, “Pemakaman di Pekarangan” (Graves in the Yard). Puji Lestari, its author, a resident of Kembangan, […]
Rivercomber: A Visual Reflection on a Trip along the Mekong
This photo essay “Rivercomber: A Visual Reflection on a Trip Along the Mekong” is specifically designed in a pdf format. Please “Download PDF” below to read full version. […]
Grandchildren of the Volcano—Gather Around!
1/ “Magic, then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predictions and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own” – David Abram ——— When […]
What We Think About When We Think About Extinction in/from Southeast Asia, for Example
I had just turned ten years old when Chiang Mai, my hometown, where I was living at that time, hosted the 18th Southeast Asian Games or simply ‘SEA Games’ in 1995. It was a spectacular event as it was the first Southeast Asian regional sports tournament held outside of the capital city of the host […]
Preserving Nyi Pohaci Sanghyang Asri
Eating is an activity long taken for granted, and people often neglect to think about its causes and consequences. Likewise, when it comes food ingredients and their availability and accessibility in modern times, people are complacent and no longer question the purposes and reasons for eating. These are the questions that I raised through my […]
One Failure Triggers More
The abundance of our lives = The abundance of nature In the age before colonialism, before the formation of nation states that was inevitably followed by capitalistic transformations, life in the Southeast of Asia was predicated on a reverence of nature as provider of life’s necessities (sustenance, shelter, medicine, garments). A belief in animism (or […]
To Build a City on a Forest
– Abhijan Toto and Pujita Guha for the Forest Curriculum 1. Introduction ‘Forest City’ is a mega smart city project, built right off the coast of Johor, Malaysia. A joint venture between Country Garden Group, China and the Malaysian-government-backed Esplanade Danga 88 Sdn Bhd (EDSB), the Country Garden Group, Pacificview Sdn Bhd’s, Forest City […]