Episode 6: Forest Curriculum – Creating space for encounters and imagination
In this episode I’m joined by Abhijan Toto and Rosalia Namsai Engchuan from The Forest Curriculum. The Forest Curriculum is a multi-platform project for research and mutual co-learning around the naturecultures of Zomia, which is the forested belt that connects South and Southeast Asia. They first came together through a shared interest in film and cinema and have continued to organize exhibitions, public programs, performances, video, and multimedia projects. In this conversation, we talked about the importance of making space for discussions, slowing down time in building relationships, and how we can work sustainably together. We also talked about some of the challenges they faced working and researching collectively, one of which is the idea of collectives and collectivity being overly 'romanticised' in the arts especially in relation to Southeast Asia.
About Forest Curriculum
The Forest Curriculum (Bangkok/Yogyakarta/Manila/Seoul/Berlin/Santa Barbara) is an itinerant and nomadic platform for interdisciplinary research and mutual co-learning, based in Southeast Asia, and operating internationally. Founded and co-directed by curators Abhijan Toto and Pujita Guha, and with Rosalia Namsai Engchuan, it works with artists, collectives, researchers, indigenous organizations and thinkers, musicians, and activists, to assemble a located critique of the Anthropocene via the naturecultures of Zomia, the forested belt that connects South and Southeast Asia. The Forest Curriculum organizes exhibitions, public programs, performances, video and multimedia projects, as well as an annual intensive in a different location around the region, which gathers practitioners from all over the world to engage in collective research and shared methodologies: The Forest And The School, Bangkok (2019); The Forest Is In The City Is In The Forest I, Manila (2020) and II, Online (2020-2021).
About Abhijan Toto
Abhijan Toto is a curator and writer, interested in ecosophy, indisciplinary research, labour and finance, based in Bangkok, Thailand and Seoul, South Korea. In 2018, he co-founded the Forest Curriculum with Pujita Guha, a multi-platform project for research and mutual co-learning around the naturecultures of the forested belts of South and Southeast Asia. He is the Artistic Director of A House In Many Parts, a multi-disciplinary festival in Bangkok, supported by the Goethe-Institut and French Embassy, which he founded in 2020. He is also curator, with Mari Spirito of A Few In Many Places (2021), Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul, New York, San Juan, Guatemala City, a platform for international collaboration and collective practice, conceived by Protocinema. He has previously worked with the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; Bellas Artes Projects, Manila and Bataan, the Philippines; Council, Paris; and Asia Art Archive.
About Rosalia Namsai Engchuan
Rosalia Namsai Engchuan is a social anthropologist and filmmaker based between Berlin and Southeast Asia. Her PhD research at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, looks at practices of community filmmaking in Indonesia, investigating how cinematic epistemologies produce and socialise knowledges. Her latest video work Complicated Happiness is a speculative research, pivoting around the Thai Park in Berlin, that aims to undo the underlying structures of colonialism, race, gender and class that shape the production of our worlds. Rosalia curates screenings and dialogical encounters with a focus on independent and experimental works from locales of the ‘epistemological’ South, often in collaboration with the Berlin based collective un.thai.tled. She is currently the 2021 Goethe-Institut fellow at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin with the Nation, Narration, Narcosis: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories project. She is a member of the Forest Curriculum, and a founding member of un.thai.tled and with the rubbles, both based in Berlin.
Find out more at theforestcurriculum.com