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Talk
Proposal
Project
Text
Text
Exhibition
WET-HOT
Per Tropicapita
Fruit Atlas
Lush Tropes
On a Grove
A Tropical Scene
Essen
Madrid
Rotterdam
Kuala Lumpur / Singapore
New Haven, CT
001.
002.
003.
004.
005.
006.
Talk
Proposal
Project
Text
Text
Exhibition
WET-HOT
Per Tropicapita
Fruit Atlas
Lush Tropes
On a Grove
A Tropical Scene
Essen
Madrid
Rotterdam
Kuala Lumpur / Singapore
New Haven, CT
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Bullmannaue 20A
Essen
Germany
9–13 November 2022
+ × +
Originally presented at
IMPACT22 Local Fabrics:
On Practices of Emergence
WET-HOT: Towards a Financial Ontology of Tropical Capital is a presentation that explores the entwined histories of imperial enterprises and capitalist extractivism within the tropics.
Departing from the visualities of ‘hot money’ and financial liquidity as capital instruments that govern the developmental politico-economic discourses of (post-colonial) tropical countries, WET-HOT proposes a new cartography of contemporary capital impulses that mirrors the colonial plundering of tropical nations and societies as well as subversive possibilities embodied by the circulation of tropical bodies and affects in gestures such as remittance, cooking, and gatherings.
Also available as a lecture performance.
2022–
+ × +
Developed as part of
Young Climate Prize 2023
with the mentorship of
Paola Antonelli
Senior Curator
Museum of Modern Art
Per Tropicapita is a speculative toolkit for planetary activism between and betwixt members of the Global Majority in (sub)tropical locales.
Considering the political economies and ecologies of agrarian transformations and peasant uprisings across the tropical belt throughout the 20th century, this project draws on and remixes the frameworks of social and policy design as sociotechnical systems that can enable mutualistic actions across vastly uneven distances and magnitudes.
Both an audit of the current landscapes and trajectories of hyper-local environmental activism and a proposition to consider potential choreographies of political resistance that can ferment coalition building beyond optics into geographies of stewardship and solidarity, Per Tropicapita critically rethinks the structures through which political and social outcomes may be derived for planetary-scale environmental justice.
Paseo de la Chopera, 14
Madrid
Spain
2023–
+ × +
First presented at
OPENLAB#02
The Metabolic Sublime
As part of
LAB#02
'The Metabolic Sublime'
Collaborative Prototyping Laboratory
Manifesting as an index and methodology for knowledge-production and -sharing, Fruit Atlas examines the media and economic histories of tropical fruits as objects of transnational capital flows to imagine new possibilities in production and consumption rooted in a situated understanding of native ecologies and epistemes.
As a critical element to the formation of the imaginaries which were key to colonial engagements in/with/through the tropics, fruits are not just delicious foods but potent symbols of global logistics in late capitalism. Mapping cosmologies and communities from across the globe, Fruit Atlas is an invitation to consider that planetary politics may well begin with the mouth.
Watch the presentation-performance from the first phase here.
Museumpark 25
Rotterdam
The Netherlands
2023
+ × +
Originally commissioned for
PIN-UP Magazine
Issue 35: Environments!
As part of
Design Draft #2
Lush Tropes: Reevaluating Tropical Architecture is a piece of architectural fabulation that traces a genealogy of tropicality in modern Anglophone design history.
Weaving together episodic vignettes of colonial encounters, technical appropriations, and architectural historiography, this piece is a working fragment from a larger essay project.
Read it online here.
Rudolph Hall
180 York St
New Haven, CT
United States of America
2023-2025
+ × +
Advised by
David Sadighian
Assistant Professor
Yale School of Architecture
Co-Advised by
Carol Carpenter
Senior Lecturer Emeritus Yale School of the Environment
With special thanks to
Keller Easterling;
Esther da Costa Meyer;
Michael Dove;
Elisabeth Wood;
Jonathan Wyrtzen;
Michael Osman;
Ayesha Ramachandran;
Alexander Gil Fuentes;
Paola Antonelli;
Kamal Solhaimi;
Kak Maznah Unyan;
and
the villagers of
Kampung Sungai Bumbun
On a Grove: Seven Views from a Malaysian Plantation is a graduate thesis project* inspired by the 1922 short story In a Grove by Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, which takes the form of seven contradictory testimonials to a murder that each reveal the variable relationship between certainty, truth, and representation.
An investigation into how extractive industries, corporate financial capital, and colonial techniques of governance and enclosure co-constituted each other in and through the colonial spaces of British Malaya and Singapore to produce the plantation landscapes of contemporary Malaysia as both place and image, On a Grove draws on and inverts the genre and cadence of the colonial travelogue as a narrative strategy to situate a spatial history of property, desire, and accumulation in colonial Southeast Asia.
Structured as seven interlocking vignettes that each reflect a specific position on/of Pulau Carey—an island in West Malaysia that has been the site of an active plantation for more than a century with its own complex histories of land-grabs, indigenous customary territory, and settler migration—this thesis seeks to trouble and problematize the ambivalence of the plantation as an instrument of capital and empire to imagine new trajectories of equity, solidarity, and justice within agrarian communities.
Crucially, this thesis also marks an attempt to contend with the entangled ethics of plantation ethnography as an academic genre in order to propose potentially generative forms of frictions, slippages, and evasive maneuvres for resistance.
*Currently being reworked into a manuscript.
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Sites and archives visited:
- Arkib Negara Malaysia
- Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia
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Bank Negara Malaysia Financial Services Library
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SD Guthrie Plantation Museum
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Kampung Sungai Bumbun
- Mah Meri Cultural Village
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National Archives of Singapore
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National Library, Singapore
- Singapore Botanical Gardens Library
32 Edgewood Ave
New Haven, CT
United States of America
29 May–11 June 2025
+ × +
Featuring the works of
Ana Claudia Almeida;
Paulina Moncada;
Z.T. Nguyen;
Hafsa Nouman
A Tropical Scene is a group exhibition that examines the visual and epistemic production of tropical subjectivities and spaces through the works of four artists whose practices engage and contest tropicality as both colonial construct and embodied knowledge:
Z.T. Nguyen explores the uneasy corporeal entanglements that straddle and caress desires, diseases, and devotions, embedded in the bodies of tropical subjects;
Paulina Moncada interrogates the representational and epistemic politics of tropical landscapes as articulated through cartographic apparatuses and other spatial instruments;
Hafsa Nouman studies the temporal and physical dimensions of weathering and corrosion under the climatic regimes of the tropical belt;
Ana Claudia Almeida offers new gestural and material vocabularies of self-fashioning in the key of emancipatory logics that embrace mutability, spontaneity, and fluidity.
Z.T. Nguyen explores the uneasy corporeal entanglements that straddle and caress desires, diseases, and devotions, embedded in the bodies of tropical subjects;
Paulina Moncada interrogates the representational and epistemic politics of tropical landscapes as articulated through cartographic apparatuses and other spatial instruments;
Hafsa Nouman studies the temporal and physical dimensions of weathering and corrosion under the climatic regimes of the tropical belt;
Ana Claudia Almeida offers new gestural and material vocabularies of self-fashioning in the key of emancipatory logics that embrace mutability, spontaneity, and fluidity.