Joella Kiu
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“And we want to tell the world that we want to make you large, so large that all those worlds will fit, those worlds which are resisting because they want to destroy the neoliberals and because they simply cannot stop fighting for humanity.” [1]
― Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona (Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle)
“Nothing comes without its world, so trying to know those worlds is crucial.” [2]
― Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience
I first met both Natasha Tontey and Nawin Nuthong by way of the Internet―the same way many of us now meet new people―to conduct interviews for an online platform, Object Lessons Space. This essay draws upon insights from these initial interviews, but also incorporates more recent conversations with both artists. It will examine the various ways in which they approach the process of making their work—a process that is steeped in worldbuilding. Given the shared affinities within both artists’ practices, it feels serendipitous to now know that they will both be showing work as part of the same exhibition.
Worldbuilding is integral to the process of telling any story. It often entails developing compelling characters and environments, and might even extend to devising language systems and mapping new places. Whilst it is a significant undertaking to build a single world, both Tontey and Nuthong’s efforts in this regard work towards multiplicity and variegation. To this end, this essay draw upon de la Cadena and Blaser’s invocation of the pluriverse, which they see as “heterogeneous worldings coming together as a political ecology of practices, negotiating their difficult being together in heterogeneity.”[3] This notion of expansiveness, and the possibility of even holding space for contradictions, are undercurrents within Garden Amidst The Flame, 2 seconds before revolution in a leaf, Flux, Empty Tomb, and Paper Wing.
This essay dives into the multivalent worlds of Garden Amidst The Flame, 2 seconds before revolution in a leaf, Flux, Empty Tomb, and Paper Wing. The works themselves will foreground this essay, and it will begin by examining how the videos look, sound and are presented. Following that discussion, it will also discuss the background to these works and the artists’ methodologies. By drawing different elements into focus at varying points, the optical concept of depth of field becomes both metaphor and framework for the structure and approach of this essay.
Seeing Worlds
Visually striking and infinitely imaginative, colour plays an important role in setting the scene for Garden Amidst The Flame. For the most part, the work is awash in dreamy, hazy hues. Scenes shot in the protagonist’s room often feature a soft focus. Other scenes, such as that of the characters gathering and reciting an intercession deep in a forest are lit vividly in shades of neon purple, yellow and blue. In fact, the girls featured in the film sparkle as they boast bedazzled press on nails, shaved eyebrows and long, straight hair snapped back with trendy hair clips.
The work was born out of an encounter Tontey had with a spiritual leader during a ritual where she was asked if she would want to participate in Karai. The Karai ritual prepares male warriors for war and is meant to endow its participants with invincibility. The challenge issued to her was unconventional, but she remembered then asking herself why rituals that were being practiced in the contemporary present came to be seen in relation to these gendered conventions, especially when the Minahasan people believe that the first human person to exist was a woman named Karéma.[4] In fact when Karéma prayed for a companion, another woman, Lumimuut, sprung forth from a rock. That neither the first nor the second human was a man within Minahasan cosmology upends any Adamic expectations of gender roles or binaries.
Garden Amidst The Flame’s world is built on the shoulders of giants such as ancestral knowledge and queer theory. The film features young dancers from the Wulan Lengkoan Kawasaran group. These young schoolgirls actively learn and practice kabasaran, a traditional Minahasan martial art and war dance that is commonly associated with the masculine. About a third into the film, the five girls perform kabasaran in their traditional red dress and wield long swords. Instead of employing a documentary perspective, Tontey presents a large part of this segment through the perspective of a kaleidoscope. Whilst portrayals of girlhood in mainstream media and pop culture can be testy and exploitative, here it is a glittering microcosm—indicative of the larger condition that the Minahasan people now find themselves navigating between the customary, indigenous, contemporary and technological.
The videos by Nawin Nuthong titled 2 seconds before revolution in a leaf, Flux, Empty Tomb, and Paper Wing started out as mood boards. Each video is a collage of animated pixel graphics: vibrant Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images of flat colour that feature one movement cycle looped endlessly. The aesthetic limitations of the file format are evident across the animated vignettes that feature across the four videos, where colour gradients are lacking. Yet each video is filled edge to edge with these clips— there is no room for empty space and no time for pause or respite.
Nuthong conceived of the term "archaeogaming" to describe his interest in looking at the longue durée through the logic of video gaming, and these four videos can be read in relation to this concept. Each individual animated sequence corresponds to an episode within Thai cultural or political history. That Nuthong selects GIF images for his mood boards is an interesting and significant choice. GIF images were introduced four years before the World Wide Web, and are reminiscent of the early, heady days of optimism about what the Internet could offer. In addition to their unique visual quality, GIF images are easy to create, save, distribute and disseminate. As Jason Eppink aptly notes, “the GIF’s enduring ethos of the commons survives long after the internet has been colonized by commerce. Unlike most image specifications, GIF was published as an open format, hastening its availability and spread.”[5] This mutability allows Nuthong countless possibilities when approaching or using any single image. This approach to multidimensional and iterative worldbuilding is encapsulated best by this analogy Nuthong uses:
“Before you build Middle Earth for The Lord of the Rings, you need to produce hundreds and hundreds of sketches. You need to think about Tolkein’s own context, and the backdrop of World War I. I’m interested in this process of sketching thousands of Gandalfs, for example, before the director settles on the right one.”[6]
Given the artist’s own background in communications design and animation, thinking about world building through the analogy of a storyboard makes much sense. To that end, what results are worlds that are constantly shapeshifting—destined to be reincarnated endlessly into various forms and beings.
Listening Worlds
Despite being a smorgasbord of visuals, the videos 2 seconds before revolution in a leaf, Flux, Empty Tomb, and Paper Wing are soundless. The artist felt that presenting the four videos with a single, cohesive soundscape could give viewers the impression that this was a consolidated two-channel installation. Whilst they are connected to one another, he thinks of them as four individual works and wanted to present them that way. Apart from being a reference to the way in which we usually encounter GIF images online, this absence also creates a contrast—the silence keeps a sensory overload at bay and draws the visual clutter more sharply into focus.
On the other hand, the soundscape for Garden Amidst The Flame is filled with voices – both human and more-than-human. The video opens with a monologue, read out by a narrator that is reminiscent of AI assistants. Yet at the same time, it doesn’t sound quite as disembodied or contrived as Siri or Alexa does, occupying this uncanny space between being not quite machine but not quite human either. Whilst it is difficult to place a finger on how best to describe this sound, a speculative thought emerged midway through the film for me when the character of the coelacanth emerged. The coelacanth was a way for Tontey to refer to deep time, which may be thought of as "the immense arc of non-human history that shaped the world as we perceive it".[7] As the figure of the coelacanth speaks in croaks, thrills and distortions, prehistoric time became flesh. Perhaps it would be more precise to describe the narrations within Garden Amidst The Flame as the utterances of ancient time.
Entering Worlds
We encounter the universe that Tontey builds whilst seated within a bright pink room that reflects the protagonist Virsay’s own room in the film. The viewing space is decked out in velveteen carpeted floors and plush beanbags for lounging. The theme of girlhood is writ large in the film, and it is evident from these display choices that Tontey does not want us to be sitting on the fringes of the world Garden Amidst The Flame exists within. It’s a girl’s world, she asserts, and we’re just living in it. In fact, extending the film’s aesthetic into the space the contained the work was not an afterthought—Tontey knew whilst making the work that it should be presented within this stylised setting.[8] Whilst filmmakers and artists often break the fourth wall by incorporating self-reflexive characters, here Tontey does so by fashioning an environment that envelops viewers in its self-reflexivity by being neither fully fictional nor fully objective.
Continuing this line of thought around presentation modes, we turn to 2 seconds before revolution in a leaf, Flux, Empty Tomb, and Paper Wing, which stand sentinel as larger-than-life figures within space. The videos are played on large LED screens that face one another. As viewers stand between the two screens, they tower over to dazzle, confront and command attention all at once. Such an encounter echoes that of being in an arcade and walking past various game machine screens on attract mode. In their book Gaming Matters: Art, Science, Magic and the Computer Game Medium, Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister describe attract mode succinctly as "a generally unplayable demonstration of a game that runs between play sessions".[9] With the goal of enticing passers by to commit to and pay for the full gaming experience, such demonstrations visualise this perpetual state of waiting—that is, until someone decides to start a game. In Nuthong’s four videos, however, there isn’t a larger game universe that lies dormant. Here, the loop is the end game—a metaphor for the wheel of time that we find ourselves within.
Assembling Worlds
In their original incarnation, 2 seconds before revolution in a leaf, Flux, Empty Tomb, and Paper Wing were first presented on a modest screen in Nuthong’s studio. This screen was a space for Nuthong to “puke his thoughts” before starting on new projects.[10] The artist recalls the time when the Bangkok CityCity gallery team did a visit to his studio, and when their attention turned to this screen. He hadn’t really thought of it as an artwork, and he credits the gallery team with encouraging him to see things differently. With that in mind, echoes of Nuthong's other video work begin to emerge within these four mood boards-as-artworks. As an example, Aleaf also features similar animated graphics within its central video installation, Horse of time.
This processual spirit is paralleled by the spontaneity in Tontey’s own filmmaking process. In fact, leaning into her instincts almost seems integral:
“Sometimes the scripts that I have written change instantly when they are being edited or produced. Things that are missing can suddenly appear, or they just don’t feel right anymore. Sometimes things or memories that were lost and disappeared as a child may appear suddenly, sometimes from scraps of dreams.”[11]
Whilst Tontey acknowledges indeterminacy in the post-production process, working with the Wulan Lengkoan Kawasaran dancers also meant that the trajectory of any shoot could be redirected by decisions that were made on the fly. This receptiveness recalls María Puig de la Bellacasa’s writings on thinking with care, where knowledge production is not a detached endeavour but a radical call to prioritise relationality. Puig de la Bellacasa writes in her book, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, that “involved knowledge is about being touched rather than observing from a distance”.[12] With Garden Amidst The Flame, I’d contend that Tontey models a method of doing with care. “I love the impulsivity that comes during the shooting [sic] day”[13], she tells me, a sentiment that respects the agency of the dancers she works with, honours the unpredictability of each set they film at, and is attuned to the energies of each new session.
It is interesting that both artists have embraced fluidity and open-endedness within their works, yet they manifest differently. Where Nuthong’s videos accomplish this by subverting common expectations of what an artwork should look like, Tontey’s Garden Amidst The Flame embodies this by maintaining a live connection to the communities that were involved in its making.
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This essay began with two quotes: one beckons us to imagine a reality so expansive that it has room for everyone, and the second articulates how braided together a thing is with its world. As Walter D. Mignolo writes, “if a pluriverse is not a world of independent units (as is the case with cultural relativism) but a world entangled through and by the colonial matrix of power, then a way of thinking and understanding that dwells in the interstices of the entanglement, at its borders, is needed.”[14] By conjuring the pluriverse, we are asked not to observe it from a distance, but to immerse ourselves in the understanding of how they coalesce, cohabit and convene. Furthermore, the pluriverse itself is legion, with one pluriverse being set in the midst of or in relation to another. It’s turtles all the way down.
The worlds that are concocted in Garden Amidst The Flame, 2 seconds before revolution in a leaf, Flux, Tomb, and Paper Wing are exercises in such border thinking and doing. Both artists combined a carefully stirred cocktail of visuals, sound and presentation methods with an open-ended approach to making their works. By doing so, we the viewers are swept into a sticky web of relations and forces with Garden Amidst The Flame and drawn into an infinite loop with Nuthong’s life-sized videos. In both instances, the result is a gelatinous, and glutinous experience.
In a way, these entanglements remind me of our present-day encounters with the Internet. The Internet has become so synonymous with and ubiquitous in our day-to-day lives that we don’t always notice how and when we drift in and out of its reach. The gloopy nature of Tontey’s and Nuthong’s works can be seen as approximations of this peculiar reality. Given their desire to model expansive universes, it makes sense then that both works are firmly rooted in the contexts and cultures that the Internet has enabled.
The task of encapsulating moving image works precisely in text and representing them fully by way of still images in a physical publication is a difficult, and possibly futile, one. Instead of striving for surveyistic accuracy, I’d see this essay as another attempt at reflecting the pluriverse that these works both create and are set within. As you re-encounter Tontey and Nuthong’s works through the words in this book, what you glean from this essay adds a new layer of meaning and relation. Perhaps worlds can also be created within worlds through close readings and imperfect translations such as ours, and therein lies Tontey’s and Nuthong’s most profound invitation. These are worlds that are so generous and so capacious that they hold us, as viewers, within them too.
This essay was commissioned for Liquidscape: Southeast Asia Today, an exhibition held at Arts Maebashi between 21 September to 24 December 2024.
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