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.

005.On a GroveText Yale School of Architecture

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:

1. Arkib Negara Malaysia
   
2. Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia
   
3. Bank Negara Malaysia Financial Services Library
   
4. SD Guthrie Plantation Museum
   
5. Kampung Sungai Bumbun
   
6. Mah Meri Cultural Village
   
7. National Archives of Singapore
   
8. National Library, Singapore
   
9. Singapore Botanical Gardens Library