Honored to be in the company of esteemed colleagues for the panel “Reimagining Global Asias in Media Art, Activism, and the Everyday,” organized by Dr. Kristy Kang and chaired by Dr. Itty Abraham (Arizona State University) held on July 11th at the beautiful campus of Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
City Stories: Digital Placemaking and Public History in Singapore, Dr. Kristy Kang, Arizona State University
City Stories: Mapping the Narratives of Singapore’s Landscapes is a digital placemaking project that explores the multi-cultural identity and urban history of two of Singapore’s earliest streets – Telok Ayer and Amoy Streets. Developed in the 1820s, they are part of what is known today as “Chinatown” – the largest conserved historic district in Singapore. Created under the direction of Kristy H. A. Kang and supported by the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore, it was launched to the public in the summer of 2020. City Stories aims to show how this enclave, while known as Chinatown, has historically been home to multiple ethnic communities whose everyday activities create a more complex understanding of place and public history in the city. The placemaking that City Stories addresses is not so much the tangible aspects of cities but the intangible aspects of memory and lived experience that also characterize cities. By elevating lived histories rather than built histories, this project challenges the privileging of urban history as being about its buildings and monuments. City Stories reveals the rich layers of lived history in Singapore, creating a form of digital placemaking that makes visible spatial practices that cannot be preserved in physical space, but are integral to the public history of cities.
(Photos by Tosh Tanaka)
Everyday Global Asias, Dr. Viola Lasmana, Rutgers University
What are the aesthetics, politics, imaginaries, and ethos of Global Asias? How is Asia(s) separated and connected by the specter of the globe, or the world, and vice versa? Where and how can we locate the nodes of Global Asias, and when do these nodes become knots and entanglements? Through a discussion of Southeast Asia-focused video art and activism (Cinemata video platform), social media initiatives (#Living1965), and other networked media technologies responding to state violence, global displacement, and gender-based discrimination, Viola Lasmana explores Global Asias as an everyday phenomenon. Emphasizing the eruption of violence in the everyday, this talk explores the particularities of situated stories and histories that formulations of the global may not take into account. A Global Asias framework methodology, practice, ethos, and commitment is one that must be critical of its very global-ness. In an everyday Global Asias, stories from marginalized, discarded communities thrive to reclaim the past, and those who are dead and disappeared are remembered. The everyday Global Asias is an understanding that the everyday is an event, and each story is of consequence. It is about living and speaking with ghosts, while activating future generations with memories, knowledge, and agency through cultural productions and collective action.
Artist Cindy Kim at the opening reception of Thinking and Feeling with the Marshall Islands
Manifest Differently from Seagoing Manifest Destiny to Archipelagic Arts and Activism within Asia Pacific and its Diaspora, Dr. Anita Chang, California State University, East Bay
This paper discusses Anita Chang’s multimedia work, Thinking and Feeling with the Marshall Islands, for the San Francisco-based Manifest Differently project that ran from 2023 to 2024, a multifaceted project using literary, visual, and media arts storytelling in conjunction with public programming, 38 artists confronted the “expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny and its legacy of generational violence, trauma, and addiction, and the outgrowth of resistance and resilience — giving fire to movements for social change” (manifestdifferently.org). Thinking and Feeling with the Marshall Islands was a window installation in San Francisco’s Mission District that Chang created, featuring the works of her Ecomedia students that include a video poem, memes, poetry, and her work-in-progress documentary Her Excellency on women leaders. Together, these works explored what it means to think and feel with the Marshall Islands, and broadly as inspired by poet scholar Craig Santos Perez, the “Anthropocene (Pacific) islands.” How do we also imagine what decolonizing the Anthropocene might look like in order to manifest differently? They also enact a poetic practice of archipelagic relations and decolonization because the works can be considered manifestations of archipelagic thinking, with its roots in Caribbean and Pacific studies — a framework, a methodology and a way of being with each other through a dynamic model of geography.
