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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.

006.A TROPICAL SCENE
Exhibition Yale School of Art

32 Edgewood Ave
New Haven, CT
United States of America

29 May–11 June 2025

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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.