Angela Pinto
Syaheedah (Sha-he-dah) Iskandar
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Roots of the Cause: Nipah Islands as Vehicles
When Shooshie Sulaiman first told us that she wanted to bring us to visit the Nipah Islands, a quick Google search brought us great confusion—what connections would she have to a resort in Batam? How was she planning to get us there from Muar in 15 minutes?
Of course, as it turns out, Shooshie intended to share something much closer and more personal to her.
Scattered across the Muar River, you’ll find these floating platforms—Nipah Palm tree structures intertwined, held together and afloat by their buoyant roots. Native to the mangroves of the region, these islands move along the river at a snail’s pace most of the time. Depending on the water currents for the day, you would see them one day, and they would disappear the day after. Sometimes, finding land to root itself and form part of the mangroves that line the river, these islands can also find themselves wisped away out into the Malacca Straits, where, for us, is unclear what happens to them after.
For Shooshie, it is in this mystery that she holds the most sentiment. As a child growing up in Muar, Shooshie often dreamed of hopping on one of these rafts to float out into the world in a grand adventure—a dream that she now shares with her daughter Siddra.
Encountering these islands up close, we immediately understood Shooshie’s endearment towards them. Throughout the rest of our time working on the Fellowship, the Nipah Islands had come to symbolise many things for us, especially in recognising the parallels that Shooshie embodies in her practice. For one, the islands represent this idea of slowing down and taking things as they come—something Shooshie always emphasised as key to countering the over-productive, over-saturated nature of our work today. As Isabelle Stengers puts it, the act of slowing down also entails “becoming capable of learning again, becoming acquainted with things again, reweaving the bounds of interdependency. It means thinking and imagining, and in the process creating relationships with others that are not those of capture.” [1]
When we consider these Nipah Islands alongside this notion of slowing, we become openly attuned towards revisiting, reconsidering and remembering—allowing ourselves to be reacquainted. One of the biggest lessons from witnessing Shooshie’s practice up close is that ideas and ideals already exist without grandeur or need to push against the tides to find. This is to say that the mundane and the everyday already offer us ways to approach the world differently. We need only to make the space to allow what it teaches us to come to the fore.
Shooshie's connection to the islands draws from her childhood imaginings but also calls towards her keen sense of the ordinary. For her, the “ordinary is the most precious circumstance of life” [2] and is something that time and again rings true in her practice: encountering objects, circumstances and people within the everyday and—not turning them into—but seeing the art in them.
For anyone else living in Muar, the Nipah Islands are merely a part of the landscape, mostly seen drifting in the background, maybe to some even a hazard, but largely it remains a placid component of day-to-day life. Few would consider charting a boat, purchasing GPS trackers, and planting golden kancils as voyagers in an effort to track their adventures in the sea.
This brings us to the second metaphor that the Nipah Islands hold for us: a big interconnected cloud of ideas. Some perhaps not yet fully fleshed out, some budding, some dead in the water, but all dependent on each other to make it ashore.
Indexing The Ordinary
With all that in mind, therefore, comes the Nipah Island Index. In its entirety, the Index serves as an archive for the Fellowship, using the format of an index as a method of sorting and storing fragments that we have collected over the last two years. It also is an exercise around questions of an archive: what gets stored? What gets left out? How do we meaningfully archive, document, talk about, and consider notions continuously in a state of flux? What is worth knowing and sharing?
Containing documentation on materials, stories, events, anecdotes, ideas, images and snippets of time, the Nipah Island Index acts as an exercise of remembering and assembling without sequencing, prioritising, or systemising one node of knowledge above another. In doing so, it becomes an evergrowing database of experiences accumulated—a mishmash of facts, fiction and speculations that make up one whole like the Nipah Islands held together by the Fellowship.
Considering the fluid nature of Shooshie’s practice, which has very much governed the ethos of the Fellowship, we thought an ongoing visual index could allow us a way to record the idiosyncrasies that are not peripheral but rather core tangents within Shooshie’s expansive cosmology. From food, repeated symbolisms or occurrences, phrases or terminologies, material and immaterial approaches, fabled stories or hearsay—the non-exhaustive list goes on. In our attempt to counter simplified definitions, the visual index is our way of sharing these rich, entangled patterns, proposing a descriptive and generous way of engaging with artistic practices—one that resists closure and embraces complexity, ambiguity and multiplicity.
Like the Nipah Islands, these fragments may one day take root to form a larger work or method or way of being—or die off before it can find land. But in being written down, they create room for someone else to encounter them, take them up, and drift toward an unknown path of their own.
This article was first written in February 2025 with the hopes that things will continue to be added as time passes.
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