Planetary Solidarity

Artists Daniel Lie and Juliana Dos Santos talk about Daniel’s search for their ancestry in Indonesia, the country of origin of their artist grandparents who migrated to Brazil in the 1960s, to reflect on the South-to-South relationship between both latitudes and the diasporic bond between them.

As a call for other ways of living beyond the heteropatriarchal regime, Comunidad Catrileo+Carrión draws poetics to imagine epupillan utopias, tides of planetary solidarity that go beyond the binary.

In conversation with the artist and researcher Ana García Jácome, writer Minh Nguyen and artist Jacobo Zambrano-Rangel discuss Jácome’s practice, the social construction of disability, comparative disability studies in México and abroad, reconceiving its historical and present-day conditions through art, and the possibility of solidarity across difference.

In today’s climate of globalizing polarisation, curator Andrea Fam revisits Khmer artist, Vandy Rattana’s Monologue Trilogy which provides a timely reminder of our anthropological propensity to historical amnesia, and resilience.

Amidst the ongoing pandemic in Indonesia, artists Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina deepen their relations with fear by utilizing gravitation and eleven artifacts collected over the last six years.

Invoking the spectrum of the rainbow, curator Chatvichai Prommadhattavedi reflects on the exhibition “Spectrosynthesis II – Exposure of Tolerance: LGBTQ in Southeast Asia” as part of a genealogy in the field of art that recognizes sex-gender diversity as an inherent part and always present of making community before authoritarianism.

From the pilot issue of The Against Nature Journal, a biannual arts and human rights magazine exploring “crime against nature” laws and their legacies, we bring you four columns authored by activists, writers, and scholars that glimpse into LGBTQI+ life, culture, struggles and hopes in locations where crime against nature laws and related regressions of reproductive, sexual orientation, and gender identity rights still prevail.

Artist and curator Christian Bendayán reviews a current of Amazonist art through the work of the artists Chonon Bensho, from the Shipibo-Konibo people, and Rember Yahuarcani, from the Áimen+ clan of the Huitoto-Murui people, who articulate ancestral knowledge to remember other forms of existence beyond the white logic that has deformed the territory known as Peru.

Acknowledging quarantine life as a work activity, Philippines-based writer Alice Sarmiento remembers rest as a form of resistance to the market logic that exploits us all.

Curator Zoe Butt reflects on her bonds of unity with creators, colleagues and friends to dimension the power that lies in cultural work, and how knowledge is articulated as a lived experience to nurture the struggle and survival in a wounded world.

As part of the Green Art Lab Alliance, an international network of art organizations contributing to environmental sustainability, researcher and curator Yasmine Ostendorf talks with SAKA (Artist Alliance for Genuine Land Reform and Rural Development) based in the Philippines and Common Room Networks Foundation (Common Room) based in Indonesia about collaborative survival in dominant systems that are (still) informed by (neo)colonial, patriarchal and capitalist power structures.

Recognizing the crises that we inhabit globally, the curator and writer Syafiatudina reflects on collaborative survival as an ethical sense with the potential to re-organize artistic and cultural practices beyond the work/life dichotomy.

Revisiting the impacts of modern developmentalism located in Asia, curator Jo Ying Peng, guest editor for the second part of this issue, reflects on artist Kao Jun Honn’s socially engaged practices and invites curator Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran to talk about how Art Labor’s project “Jrai Drew” was made in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.

Curator Billy Tang talks with the Geocinema collective (Solveig Suess & Asia Bazdyrieva) about the sensory networks that represent the Earth on a planetary scale and their relationship with a geopolitical reconfiguration of the world in the face of the climate crisis around the international cooperation project Digital Belt and Road (DBAR).

As an attempt to recalibrate our individual beliefs, with respect to identity, solidarity, and resistance, artist and curator Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick speak with artist Gaye Chan, a member of the collective EATING IN PUBLIC, on autonomous systems of exchange as part of their actions in Honolulu and Kāneʻohe, Oʻahu.

Researcher and curator Bénédicte Ramade interviews artist duo Marilou Lemmens and Richard Ibghy on their practice shaping efficient forms in countering the spoil of the earth because of the capitalist, extractivist and colonial strategy of industrial agriculture in Canada.