SYNAPSE in collaboration with HKW | Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Vargas Museum & Filipiniana Research Center: Introductory Session
Curated by Renan Laru-An
Part of the Project:
HERDING ISLANDS, RATS & THE ANTHROPOCENEHerding Islands, Rats and the Anthropocene is a multi-part, hybrid program of activities for reading discourses on development and integration. It seeks to attach a multi-layered and dialectical approach to the current modes of understanding and explanation of the Anthropocene. Deploying the (pre)determined and scattered articulations of the Anthropocene Project into the grounds of Southeast Asia, it gathers mediating structures and systems of exposition through the region’s political economy and knowledge scenes. Here, the practice of reading aims to be polyphonic and fractured, while allowing different impulses to collapse within the quandaries and histories of development and integration. The indeterminate and alternating coordinates for reading in Southeast Asia could chart speculative routes for new practices of mediation and translation: releasing subjects and methods of reading from disciplinary self-containment and transforming codified discourses of development and integration.
The initial reading of Herding Islands, Rats and the Anthropocene is focused on the Philippines and shared with international collaborators and local experts dedicated to problematizing development and integration. Composed of three sessions between Metro Manila and the province of Laguna, the broad scope of the iteration is funneled through the following vectors: intervention, violence, and reaction. Each session lays out the network of the Anthropocene, development, and integration in a complex situation where the procedure of knowing and not-yet-knowing relate to or come in conflict with one another. The set of activities animates creative tension and collaborative determination across interacting knowledges beyond their territorial boundaries.
The preview will open with Christian Illi’s new work Planting Rice; { adapt ≠ adopt } (2015) … Broadly, these works deal with images and representation of development and integration. But they become specific when … worked around the images and representation of development and integration by institutions or any administrative-political organisations as vectors of their works.
Planting Rice; { adapt ≠ adopt } is a video essay of the artist’s trip to the International Rice Research Institute and the alternative, farmer-led network MASIPAG in Los Banos, Laguna. Here, we see … streams of relationship with images collapse into a watershed: one coming from institutions and one from the artists. It also leads us to a discussion on how these images could interpellate and produce injunctions under the authorities of art, development and integration.
Planting Rice; { adapt ≠ adopt } is a research triangulation between the invisibility of structures, transparency of political actions and the agency of artistic inscription. It induces itself along the questions of how one develops a position in order to participate in a set of problematics.