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001.
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006. Context

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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000.
Initiated by Alfonse Chiu at the Centre for Urban Mythologies (CUM), Tropical Scenes; Or, Notes for Staging Tropical Futurisms (2020–) is an ongoing research and curatorial project that investigates and critiques the conception of tropicality in contemporary visual and spatial cultures from within and without the tropical belt and diasporas.

Defined and reified over the longue durée of colonial expansion and resource extraction, the tropical belt has historically served as the stage and backdrop to imperial choreographies of race, space, and capital from the 15th century till now. As persistent geocultural tropes that underwrite contemporary understandings of development, progress, and modernity within political and economic regimes of present world-systems, tropical imaginaries represent spectral gestures of colonial and imperial logics and power structures that have continued to condition and shape the contours of life and death for communities and territories of the Global Majority.

Deriving its title from a common description of photographs and images held in the collection of the United States Library of Congress that were all described as depicting  'tropical scenes' despite the disparate milieus of their production, Tropical Scenes aims to invert the imperial-colonial view of the tropics upon itself so as to decompose the sta(t/g)ecraft of constructing tropical space and subjectivity, and propose new modes of be(com)ing that celebrate and variegate the messy, plural possibilities of the tropical as an epistemic, affective, and metabolic register

Tropical Scenes is developed with the support of the Tropical Studies Working Group, initiated and convened by Alfonse Chiu (MED’25, Yale School of Architecture), at the Yale University Whitney Humanities Center; the Yale School of Architecture Master of Environmental Design program; and the Tropical Resources Institute at the Yale School of the Environment.

002.Per TropicapitaProposal The World Around

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.