An Itinerant Bestiary is a public art installation conceived of by the Forest Curriculum that builds on our ongoing research strand “How To Not Build A Nation”. It is based on an understanding of the modes in which nation-states (as both conceptual configurations and empirical realities) reproduce and perpetuate colonial and pre-colonial violences, and on the role of non-human agencies through these historical and contemporary processes. The project grounds itself in the terrain of zomia, the upland swathe of forests that connect Eastern South Asia, Southern China and mainland and parts of archipelagic Southeast Asia, and that has been the territory of indigenous communities, fugitive and guerrilla groups, and spirits, and more recently violently pierced by transnational infrastructure projects. Through An Itinerant Bestiary we aim to construct a speculative framework for a post-national imaginary rooted in unresolved narratives of resistance and on decolonization as a continuous process. It seeks to imagine forms of governance and sovereignty that are attuned to the nature-cultures of these geographies and challenge the inherited and inherent hierarchies of nation-state based models. 

 The installation itself takes the form of 20 flags that pierce violently into the earth at jagged angles, creating a seemingly haunted atmosphere of unresolved contestations. Alluding to the history of the region, this form is reminiscent of supra-national initiatives such as at the Bandung Conference, and brings to mind the manners in which such seemingly-idealistical but statist decolonial exercises produced subsequent histories of violence and oppression. It reminds us of the many ways in which nation states weaponize ideas of national unity to continuously impoverish those at the margins, often through brutal military occupations. Drawing from these narratives, the flags displayed tell tales of non-human agents that pierce through these narratives, shaping and shifting shape, and thereby producing situations of entanglement, or resistance, with statist power. These other and often dismissed forms of agencies are displayed on the flags draw on figures such as weretigers and manananggals, as well opium, coffee, and plant species,  and symbols of resistance, allowing us other ways to think through and from these territories. Together (as an assemblage), the flags create an assembly of agencies beyond the human through which to understand and speculate towards other forms of life.

More information here:

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/415320/sea-art-festival-2021non-human-assemblages/