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
00. 01. 02. 03. 04. 05. 06.Context Talk Proposal Project Text Text Exhibition WET-HOT Per Tropicapita Fruit Atlas Lush Tropes On a Grove A Tropical Scene