Island b: Southern Universe: An Exposition Proposal
Wu Chi-Yu + Rikey Tenn
Southern Universe：An Exposition Proposal is a research-based participatory board game inspired by a speculative history which explores the period of Japanese colonization when Taiwan underwent a modernization of its plantations. Players will revisit “The Grand Sight of Formosa Exhibition for the Commemoration of the 40th Year of its Foundation Under Japanese Rule” and experience the historical era of the grand plantations by curating fictive hidden versions of exhibitions. The participants act as members of pro-Japanese families in Taiwan, historically known as “powerful families”(有力者家族) in Japanese, who were in preparing for the exhibition proposals depicted through the board game. This board game is therefore also considered as a participatory performative workshop.
Using the notion of “terra nullius”as a main thread of the game, the players are placed in a setting where there is an abundance of resources from the Southern islands. The key ways to gain control over the Southern area are to grow high economic value cash crops, reclamate mountainous areas and forests and process crops.
At the beginning of the game, players will start off their planting plans with a limited labour force. Some species are developed from local research on useful plants, while others are high-value cash crops introduced from elsewhere. While developing more resources, players use the bargaining chips accumulated from farming and planatation activities to experience this era as much as possible. From conflicts in the mountains, experimentation on the farms, to the experience of modern urban life, these experiences are the best inspirations for you to plan the exhibition.
This board game, hosted and guided by Wu Chi-Yu and Rikey Tenn, is based on historical research. Players employ speculative strategies to reposition history as the future, engage in an interactive way, rethink the dialectics of the coexistence between the planations and the exhibition display, seek a multiplicity of anti-imperialistic imaginaries and collectively script multi-layered pasts. We are extending our welcome to enthusiastic players who enjoy board games, science fiction and storytelling or people who are interested in history, colonial planatations, ecology, botany, or economy to participate in this special experimental performance with us.
Time：APR 27 2024（Sat）14:00－17:00
Venue：Gallery E (B2)
Online Pre-registration
- Number of participants: 12.
- Participating in the event is free of charge. Please purchase an ordinary TFAM visitor's tichet when entering the museum.
- In the case of changes on the event schedule, information on the official website shall prevail.
Wu Chi-Yu
Based in Taipei, Wu Chi-Yu (b. 1986) is a multimedia artist whose works include film, video installation, and photography. He delves into the lost and unestablished links among species, environment, and the technology that constructs human civilization, exploring the complex historical geography of Asia and the interdependence of various beings through multiple narratives. His works have been exhibited and screened at Times Art Museum, Guangzhou (2021); MoCA, Taipei (2020); 2018 Shanghai Biennale; 2016 Taipei Biennial; Beijing International Short Film Festival (2017) and was a resident artist at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2014-2015).
Rikey Tenn
Rikey Tenn is the founder of the Nusantara Archive Project (since 2017), which is based on the shared history of Taiwan and Southeast Asia and its decolonization process. He initiated and co-organized the workshop Nusantara in Future Tense with Singaporean artist collective soft/WALL/studs in 2020. As a researcher, he was involved in The Secret South (curator: Nobuo Takamori) in 2020, as part of which he presented the Nusantara Archive (archive f) His most recent collaborative project, A Field Guide to Getting Lost in the Southern Universe, (the first year) is a CREATORS creative/Support Program initiated by C-LAB in 2022.
[Commoning 1]
A Sea of Islands: Networked Art Communities in Our Time
Launched in 2017, Nusantara Archive was originally conceived as a framework and methodology for regional decolonization. The word "Nusantara" is a combination of the Sanskrit words "nusa" (island) and "antara" (outer), referring to the vision of the Malay Archipelago (including Southern Thailand, the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, Borneo, the Indonesian Archipelago, and the Southern Philippines), where Malay is the lingua franca. Given the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the global art ecosystem in 2020, our initial plans for art residency exchanges between Taiwan and Southeast Asia have also undergone changes. We have begun to shift our attention towards local communities as well as to think through the agency of technological media in the practice of art community, further internalizing the metaphor of the "island" into the reterritorialization of regional networks.
During the post-pandemic community activities on-site, we will invoke Epeli Hau'ofa's theory of the Pacific islands by replacing the notion of "islands in a far sea" with "a sea of islands", and experiment with a mode of decentralized collaboration specific to art communities. With this conceptual shift, the exhibition reflects on its own post/re-colonial situation from the perspective of the sea. Simultaneously, it connects the genealogy of actual islands such as Malaysian islands, Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu, and Austronesia along with historical “Nanyang” (South Sea), with individual islands serving as metaphorical landmarks. This aims to expand the Nusantara Archive residency project both before and after the outbreak of the pandemic. The five consecutive weekends consist of a lecture performance, screenings, discussions, workshops and a music party carried out by five groups of artists and curators. It is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal dynamics and multi-scalar perspectives of the "Sea of Islands" that are not confined by the linear time of progress.
Through the spatial metaphor of the "ocean" as a technology of the sensible that connects the "non-homogeneous" islands, we invite you to reflect with us on the practice of networked commons that art communities have not been able to carry out due to language barriers, technological limitations, and other factors. Finally, by curating a special features on the online Modern Art+ and special screenings, we will create memory landmarks for each week's activities.
Reference：
l “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6 (1): 148-161, 1994.
l “The Ocean in Us,” The Contemporary Pacific 10 (2): 392-410, 1998
l ISSUE 52: Archipelago Futurism?「群島未來主義？」Jun 2022
Concept Development
Rikey Tenn／Curator
Rikey Tenn is the founder of the Nusantara Archive Project (since 2017), which is based on the shared history of Taiwan and Southeast Asia and its decolonization process. He initiated and co-organized the workshop Nusantara in Future Tense with Singaporean artist collective soft/WALL/studs in 2020. As a researcher, he was involved in The Secret South (curator: Nobuo Takamori) in 2020, as part of which he presented the Nusantara Archive (archive f) His most recent collaborative project, A Field Guide to Getting Lost in the Southern Universe, (the first year) is a CREATORS creative/Support Program initiated by C-LAB in 2022.
Spatial Design
Wu Chi-Yu／Co-curator
Based in Taipei, Wu Chi-Yu (b. 1986) is a multimedia artist whose works include film, video installation, and photography. He delves into the lost and unestablished links among species, environment, and the technology that constructs human civilization, exploring the complex historical geography of Asia and the interdependence of various beings through multiple narratives. His works have been exhibited and screened at Times Art Museum, Guangzhou (2021); MoCA, Taipei (2020); 2018 Shanghai Biennale; 2016 Taipei Biennial; Beijing International Short Film Festival (2017) and was a resident artist at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2014-2015).
Contact：02-25957656 ext.122