INDEXTYPETITLEFIRST POSITION
000.

001.
002.
003.
004.
005.
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.

003.Fruit AtlasProject Medialab Matadero

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.