antennae
THE JOURNAL OF NATURE IN VISUAL CULTURE
SUMMER 2021
Volume 2

uncontainable
naturesEditor in Chief			Giovanni Aloi – School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sotheby’s Institute of Art

Academic Board			Steve Baker – University of Central Lancashire
Melissa Boyde – University of Wollongong

antennae

Ron Broglio – Arizona State University
Matthew Brower – University of Toronto
Eric Brown – University of Maine at Farmington
Carol Gigliotti – Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver
Donna Haraway – University of California, Santa Cruz

THE JOURNAL OF NATURE IN VISUAL CULTURE

Susan McHugh – University of New Englandedited by Giovanni Aloi

Brett Mizelle – California State University
Claire Parkinson – Edge Hill University
Cecilia Novero – University of Otago
Jennifer Parker–Starbuck – Royal Holloway					Annie Potts – University of Canterbury

Antennae (founded in 2006) is the international, peer reviewed, academic

Ken Rinaldo – Ohio State University

journal on the subject of nature in contemporary art. Its format andNigel Rothfels – University of Wisconsin

contents are inspired by the concepts of ‘knowledge transfer’ and ‘widening

Jessica Ullrich – University of Art Münster

participation’. Three times a year, the Journal brings academic knowledge

Andrew Yang – School of the Art Institute of Chicago

within a broader arena, one including practitioners and a readership that
may not regularly engage in academic discussion. Ultimately, Antennae
encourages communication and crossovers of knowledge amongst
artists, scientists, scholars, activists, curators, and students. In January

Global Contributors		
Sonja Britz / Tim Chamberlain / Conception Cortes / Lucy Davis / Amy Fletcher / Katja Kynast / Christine Marran / Carolina
Parra / Zoe Peled / Julien Salaud / Paul Thomas / Sabrina Tonutti / Joanna Willenfelt

2009, the establishment of Antennae’s Senior Academic Board, Advisory

Advisory Board			

Board, and Network of Global Contributors has affirmed the journal as an

Rod Bennison / Helen J. Bullard / Claude d’Anthenaise / Lisa Brown / Chris Hunter / Karen Knorr / Susan Nance / Caroline

indispensable research tool for the subject of environmental and nature

Picard / Andrea Roe / David Rothenberg / Angela Singer / Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson

studies. Contact the Editor in Chief at: antennaeproject@gmail.com Visit
our website for more info and past issues: www.antennae.org.uk

Copy Editor and Design			
Erik Frank and Giovanni Aloi

Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (ISSN 1756-9575) is published triannually by AntennaeProject, Chicago.
Contents copyright © 2020 by the respective authors, artists, and other rights holders. All rights in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and its contents reserved by their respective owners. Except as permitted by the Copyright Act, including section 107 (fair use), or other applicable law, no part of the contents of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture may be reproduced without the written permission of the author(s) and/or other rights holders.
By submitting your article for publication, you grant Antennae the right to reproduce the work and associated images in electronic format or on paper format derived from the on-line work. If the work has been solicited or commissioned by Antennae,
the intellectual property of such contribution rests with Antennae. If such category of work is published in Antennae, and thisalso represent the first published instance for the work, a written request for a re-print needs to be forwarded to the Editor inorder to obtain authorisation for partial or full reproduction of the work. Interview questions written for Antennae and relative
answers supplied by interlocutors become, upon publication, intellectual property of Antennae and a written request for a reprint needs to be forwarded to the Editor in order to obtain authorisation for partial or full reproduction in other publications.

Front and Back Cover: Yee I-Lann, 7-headed Lalandau Hat, 2020,
woven by Lili Naming, Siat Yanau, Shahrizan bin Juin, split bamboo pus weave with kayu uber black natural dye, matt sealant,
variable dimensions. Photo: Isaac Collard © Yee I-Lannuncontainable
naturesantennaecontents

16

35
How things-in-common
hold us together

Lacquer’s ecology,
or the swirl

text and images: Tintin Wulia

text: Kevin Chua
images: Oanh Phi Phi

In this essay, Kevin Chua reads
Vietnam-based artist Oanh Phi Phi’slacquer work through the lens of
ecology. Instead of the familiar storyof lacquer as essential to national
belonging and identity, Oanh Phi Phi– in testing the limits and potential ofthe medium – is engaged in a projectof unbinding lacquer’s history.

Through examining her public art
interventions since 2014, including
within the econo-political ecologyof Hong Kong’s informal cardboard
waste (OCC) trade route, Tintin Wulia
conceptualises “stakeholding”, “fieldpractice”, and “averted vision” in tracing
things with Urry’s mobile ethnography.
These are methodological concepts forcooperating with common things, tostimulate their eclosion into things-incommon.

62
Plastic nation
text: Jose Santos P. Ardivillain conversation: Yee I-Lann and Lucy Davis

Ardivilla delves into the notion ofplastic as focus on both materiality
and of identity as recast by Filipino
contemporary artists. The malleabilityof the plastic material is reflected on
the shifting assertions of place, of
ritual, and of conflation with the body.

This conversation resonateswith topical themes pertaining
to ecologies, materialities,
collaborative practices,
decolonisation and politics ofdisplay of vernacular craft incontemporary art contexts.

6antennae

Dirt Stories: Củ Chi & Temasek

Hello darling!

text and images: James Jacktext and images: Garima Gupta

James Jack’s work explores
the richness of dirt throughstories rooted in our immediatesurroundings that resist settler
narratives of land. While respectfully
touching these sensitive sites oftrauma and transition encounteredin Vietnam and Singapore, voicesfrom the past emerge. As these
temporary dirt windows open andtheir stories unfold, an opportunity
for healing opens as well.

Hello Darling is a series of drawings
situated within a larger research
project that aims to read the wildlife
market in Southeast Asia though theprivate and collective imaginationsof a post-colonial archipelago. These
works are a result of an intimate
conversation with a taxidermist in
Thailand and offer a tender accountof the commodity and its maker.

102

150

79
Tikar as verb

114

53

122
Archetypes: Cordillera’s
labyrinth

140
Salty as sweat.
Red as soil. Soil as blood.
in conversation: Art Labor
and Nguyễn Phương Linh

text: Midori Yamamura

In 1989, Filipino artist Roberto Villanueva
premiered his ephemeral artwork,
Archetypes: Cordillera’s Labyrinth, atCultural Center of the Philippines. Built witha mountain tribe called the Ifugaos, thisgiant walk-in maze of runo reeds was
the artist’s postcolonial response to theecological despoliations that became
pronounced during the Marcos regime.

After visiting the salt marshes
of Camargue, France, where
Indochinese laborers toiled during
the colonial period, Art Laborcollective speaks about her projectwith salt farmers and rubber
plantation overseers in Vietnam as astarting point to discuss their interestin the cultivation of natural resources.

158

164

To speak to the forest

A curious teacher

The museum survives us all

text and images: Pujita Guha and Abhijan Toto for theForest Curriculum

text: Martin Bartelmus
images: Cyprian Gaillard

text: Jason Wee

The Forest Curriculum addresses
the need for a located cosmopoliticalimagination of our current ecologicalera, rejecting the planetarity of the
Anthropocene: a geological projectthat posits the “human” as a singularspecies inheriting a damaged planet.

What does it mean to be an
independent artist-researcher
teaching in Singapore? Drawing fromobservations of the environment
and the artist’s training as a scientist,
inspired by children, fuelled byhumour and failure, this case study
shows how treating the viewer as
scientists can in turn help the artist
create meaningful works.

The Taipei Biennial, with its
attentiveness to systemically reforming the categorically ‘natural’
within the museological, names
the museum as the metonym andmetaphor of natural systems, butalso reformulates and redresses whatthese systems could be.

Ecology beyond
ethnography?
text: Samuel Lee

This article examines the politics
of picturing ecological crises in The
Oceanic, with particular interest in
ethnographic discourses and thearchive as the main terms of artistic
engagement. It also highlights the
emergence of the research topic asa curatorial format with expanded
temporalities and heightened
epistemological stakes.
7materialities
14 antennae

15

sonian Institution, working with research technician David Pecor under supervision of entomologist Dr Yvonne-Marie Linton.
[49] Flávio S. Azevedo and Michele J. Mann, “Seeing in the Dark: Embodied Cognition in Amateur Astronomy Practice,” Journal of
the Learning Sciences 27, no. 1 (August 25, 2017): 89–136.
[50] Barboza, “China’s ‘Queen of Trash’ Finds Riches in Waste Paper.”[51] Latour, Reassembling the Social, 9, 104-5, 171, 175.
[52] Field notes, various entries January to March 2015.
[53] Ate Manang is a Filipino term meaning “older sister.” I use this as a pseudonym (on subject’s request) for the leader of
the Filipino group that magnifies OCC reselling, by bulk-buying from waste collectors and distributing them amongst fellow
Filipinos as cubicle materials.
[54] A boundary object “lives in multiple social worlds and … has different identities in each.” Star and Griesemer, “Institutional
Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects,” 409.
[55] Payal Uttam, “Artist Follows Hong Kong’s Paper Trail: Cardboard City Comes to Art Basel in Hong Kong,” The Art Newspaper,
March 22, 2016, 1; AFP, “Self-Destruction and Harsh Realities at Art Basel Hong Kong | Coconuts Hong Kong,” Coconuts, March24, 2016, https://coconuts.co/hongkong/lifestyle/self-destruction-and-harsh-realities-art-basel-hong-kong/.
[56] Complex storage and shipment issues contribute to these subsequent reconfigurations: 172 Kilograms of Homes for Ate
Manang (2017) at Material Politics, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and 855 Kilograms of Homes in Another State (2019) at
Bruised: Art Action and Ecology in Asia, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Australia.
[57] Murray J. Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London Verso, 2016).
[58] Resource Recycling Editorial Staff, “From Green Fence to Red Alert: A China Timeline,” Resource Recycling News (Resource
Recycling, February 13, 2018), https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2018/02/13/green-fence-red-alert-china-timeline/.
[59] Colin Staub, “With OCC Plummeting, MRFs Face Tough Decisions,” Resource Recycling News (Resource Recycling, June 11,2019), https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2019/06/11/with-occ-plummeting-mrfs-face-tough-decisions/.
[60] ND Paper LLC, “ND Paper | United States,” ND Paper, 2019, https://us.ndpaper.com/.
[61] Uri Gal, Youngjin Yoo, and Richard Boland, Jr., “The Dynamics of Boundary Objects, Social Infastructures and Social Identities,” in ECIS 2005 Proceedings, 2005, 57, https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2005/57. Potential case studies in Peace and Development
field include cooperation through a common resource, like the migratory Hilsa fish in Bushra Nishat, Sushmita Mandal, and Ganesh Pangare, eds., Conserving Ilish, Securing Livelihoods: Bangladesh-India Perspectives (New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2018).
[62] Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 162.
[63] Chris Kimble, Corinne Grenier, and Karine Goglio-Primard, “Innovation and Knowledge Sharing across Professional
Boundaries: Political Interplay between Boundary Objects and Brokers,” International Journal of Information Management 30, no.
5 (October 2010): 437–44.
[64] Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, no. 110 (October 2004): 51–79.
[65] Arte Útil’s archive includes almost 600 useful art projects, while Creative Time’s Living as Form: Archive of Socially Engaged
Practices from 1991-2011 includes over 360 projects. Regular awards such as Visible award and the Vera List Center Prize for
Art and Politics also archive nominated projects. Asociación de Arte Util, “Arte Útil / Projects,” Arte Útil, accessed July 19, 2019,https://www.arte-util.org/projects/; Creative Time, “Living as Form,” creativetime.org, 2011, https://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2011/livingasform/archive.htm.

Tintin Wulia is an artist and Research Project Leader at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. Wulia completed her
art PhD (RMIT, 2014) after nearly fifteen years of exhibiting internationally. Initially trained as a film composer (BMus,
Berklee, 1997) and architectural engineer (BEng, Parahyangan, 1998), she works with video, sound, installation,
texts, drawings, paintings, dance, performances and public interventions to discuss the sociopolitics of mobility andthe geopolitical borders. She has published in major exhibitions including Istanbul Biennale (2005), Moscow Biennale (2011), Asia Pacific Triennale (2012), Gwangju Biennale (2012), Sharjah Biennale (2013), with works in significant
public collections including the Van Abbemuseum and He Xiangning Art Museum. Wulia is an Australia Council for
the Arts’ Creative Australia Fellow 2014-16, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow 2018, and interdepartmental Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre on Global Migration, University of Gothenburg 2018-20. In 2017 Wulia represented
Indonesia with a solo pavilion for the 57th Venice Biennale.

52 antennae

Dirt stories:
Củ Chi & Temasek
This artist portfolio is composed of living memories inside of dirt. James Jack’s work explores the richness of dirt through stories rooted
in our immediate surroundings that resist settler narratives of land. While respectfully touching these sensitive sites of trauma andtransition encountered in Vietnam and Singapore, voices from the past emerge. As these temporary dirt windows open and theirstories unfold, an opportunity for healing opens as well. Thereby spaces open for envisioning alternate futures with the voices of dirt
in solidarity with humans caring for land as part ourselves.
text and images by James JackA Window
A dirt window—A window of dirt.1 Each window opens a temporary space forreflecting on all that came before us. If we listen carefully, dirt tells stories ofpeople, microbes, and life. Spirits thrive inside each granule of dirt inside thewartime tunnels of Phú Mỹ Hưng and former train tracks in Đà Lạt, Vietnam,
the dragon kiln of Jalan Bahar and the homes in Lorong Buangkok in Singapore. In these sites, voices of the earth live on amidst human impositions. We
can relearn how to care for dirt not as something which is “dirty”, but as a livingfamily member. Especially in sites experiencing trauma, pollution, and bombing, elder Walter Ritte reminds us, “Dirt is not dirty, it’s just brown. Don’t bombit, love it. Aloha ‘Āina”.2 I create artworks together with community leaders suchas Ritte to develop and heal our relationship with land.
Creating spaces for dirt to speak is an act of artistic resistance to colonial impositions, land privatization and extractive capitalism that have separated humans from the land. In opposition to the ceding of tribal land, Young
Chief of the Cayuses said, “I wonder if the ground has anything to say? I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said? I wonder if the ground would
come alive and what is on it?”3 In the performance work Reclaiming Land, I carried one handful of dirt with artist Chand Chandramohan from a reclaimed
island back to the site of a former hill in Singapore,4 and in the workshop Talk
Story About Dirt each participant shared a story from memory with a trace ofdirt in hand on the Island of Molokai.5 Both actions challenged dominant histories of place with alternative stories that envision a future where humans
respectfully live together with more-than- humans.6
The selection of artworks included in this essay reflects on dirt stories from two sites in Southeast Asia. These two sites were part of artworks
composted with traces of dirt borrowed from sites threatened by land reclamation, village displacement, and urban development. They were created toopen windows for repairing human and more-than-human awareness of one
another, thus nurturing space for us to care for one another.753

James Jack with Chand Chandramohan
Reclaiming Land, 2014/2018, 8’27” Digital video stills. Performance carrying one handful of dirt from reclaimed border of Hantu
Island (renamed Keppel) to former hill site now parking garage for Singapore Management University
Video: Divaager, Editor: Kentaro Mori © James Jack with Chand Chandramohan

Temasek Story
Two meters underground, in the Empress Place archaeological dig, twelveof us volunteers sift sand patiently through circular-shaped mesh screenssuspended by ropes. Every ninety seconds, when released by the stoplight,
a flood of traffic buzzes by on Fullerton Road, yet hovering down inside theearth, the sound buffers to a soft silence. Shaking our screens in hand amidst
the never-ending construction zone known as Singapore, memories deep inside the ground from centuries past awaken.
“Now you are sifting through the Temasek layer of sand,” declares archaeologist Chen Sian Lim “which holds remnants of the seven-hundred-plus
year history of exchanges at the mouth of the Singapore River in the harbor”.
54 antennae

These rich black earth tones contain stories protected by yellow ochre hues
above and blanketed by sienna red tones of the topsoil visible today.
“This dig site, originally slated for two months has just been extended
for one more month because of the rich evidence we have been uncovering”,
Lim continues while holding out the shard of a porcelain teacup in one handand an amulet in the other, both of which were uncovered from the earth by
the volunteers. Rubbing the amulet with a finger, exchanges between Johorand Polynesia appeared as the thin veil of beige dirt revealed a jade tone.
We bend over and continue sifting, eyes trained to look for any objects
remaining in the screen as granules slid through below. Our task is to pick out
any artifacts that appear in the screens, though most are just stones or clumps
55

James JackJames Jack

Molokai Window, 2018. Natural pigment from mauka to makai, arabic gum and community members Malia Akutagawa Esq. point-

Natura Naturata: Light of Singapore, 2017, Natural pigments and gum arabic on window

ing to the center of the piko while talking with community leader Loretta Ritte. Installation view Honolulu Museum of Art, exhibit

Installation view of the exhibition In Praise of Shadows curated by Michelle Ho, variable dimensions.

curated by Healoha Johnston. Photograph: Shuzo Uemoto © James Jack

Photograph: Factory 1611 © James Jackof dirt, and occasionally shards of pottery, coins or glass appear as well.
However, I am enthralled with the ever-present dust which gathers into
conical mounds while shaking the screen from side to side. This dust has a lightbeige tone as it floats in the air circulating memories to life before slowly returning to the earth. After a full day underground, I ask permission to borrow asample from the Temasek layer to return with me to the studio. This Temasek
sand stayed with me long after the carpark was reconstructed into an atrium
inside the National Gallery Singapore and the trees in the parkway in front ofEmpress Memorial were transplanted. I kept these samples in Singapore with atrusted friend, so as not to disrupt their spirits when I flew back to Japan.
Two years later, the dirt samples called me back. I was talking withcurator Michelle Ho about work for an upcoming exhibit in Singapore when
voices called out from the land. At first, I thought it might be another small
earthquake, so common in Japan. We were talking about the eighty-eight dirt
drawings I had just finished in Fukushima collaborating with local community members as part of an educational project rebuilding cultural centersafter the triple disaster. Yet slowly we shifted to welcome these voices from
Temasek which “suggest imprints of further unknown histories and migrations beyond the country’s documented history”8 for the exhibition.
56 antennae

Soon after, I called archivist Koh Nguang How who had shared a studionext to mine while we were in Gillman Barracks. He told me he had moved a few
times since then. I timidly asked if he might still have the package I entrustedwith him and he immediately responded affirmatively. Months later we met and,upon opening the cardboard box in the backroom of his archive, I found all of thedirt pigments there in quiet conversation. Now humans were ready to listen tothese layers of dirt and the stories contained within.
While listening to stories by displaced inhabitants along the Singapore River,I gently passed a stone over the dark black granules in the mortar, softening into alighter grey color filled with hardships wafting with the dust in the air. In these faintclouds, visions of a multicultural and multicolored Temasek came to life. In grinding,it seemed as though we were taken back in time, to the voices of those who rested
their sampan along the banks of the Singapore river, those who walked, labored,transported, and eventually died with the tanah here became audible.
While preparing this dirt to be painted temporarily on the glass, stories continued to emerge from the sites where the traces were borrowed. The
voices of the people, insects, and other living beings circulate here in resistanceto dominant narratives of this place, and though their material existence isreturned to the earth, their stories remain here for us to put into praxis diversifying our society.
57

James JackCủ Chi Window (preparatory drawing), 2014. Natural pigment andgum arabic on paper, 38 x 19 cm© James Jack58 antennae

Củ Chi Story
In 2014 I visited the Phú Mỹ Hưng Commune with a group of artists from
Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Japan. I was the only American in thegroup. As we walked through the densely regrown forest, many of the artists
snapped photographs until we reached a small square hole in the groundcovered by a metal plate. Our guide asked for a volunteer to step inside thethin opening. We all shuttered in silence as we stared at the small, dark rectangular hole on the floor of this brightly sunlit forest.
After a minute of quiet that felt like an hour, one artist among us, Yoshinori, slid into the metal-rimmed hole barely wide enough for his pelvis whichnarrowly scraped his shoulders. My body shivered as he slipped into the dark,
moist, and cool underground. Only his raised hands remained while carefully
holding the metal cover on top above his head while slowly lowering it to close
the hole from inside. Decades ago, the leaves on top of the cover hid those protected inside the land so as not to be found by above-ground soldiers, during
what the Vietnamese call “the American war”.
Traces of dirt containing spirits seep out of black and white photographs and reach out from anti-war posters. As we continued along the dirt
pathway, it felt as if a voice sang a lullaby to grandma before she slept as
the leaf shadows passed over the hard-packed dirt pathway we walked on.
Next a young boy’s voice chattering from the earth, calling out for his mother.
Continuing along in the forest, another voice seemed to scream in the last
breaths of her life—the voices of those who fell to the earth due to unnecessary human inflicted violence.
This is one extant section of the intricate network of tunnels stretching far longer than the distance between California to Vietnam dug underground during seventeen years of war.9 The tunnels linked underground facilities including kitchens, school rooms, hospitals, music halls, living rooms
and theatres. Protected by the earth, communities thrived in resistance tocarpet bombing with agent orange, fire from automatic machine guns andexploding grenades.
Mothers gave birth to babies amidst these circumstances surroundedby earth. Their children have grown into elderly residents who retell stories
of life underground today.10 The stories hover in the material remains of the
few remaining tunnels dug during the war. The strength of residents not only
to survive inside the earth but also to live, learn and reproduce during the
war against the US11 remains a powerful reminder to us of land as sanctuary.
The land bears witness to the survival and resilience of the Vietnamese overforeign oppression.
Together with artists Đặng Minh Thành and Lugpliw Junpudsa, I slowly mixed traces of dirt from these tunnels and painted with them on paper.
Next while slowly painting them on the wall itself, the dirt opened a window
where layers of the past could be recollected in the present. While preparing, painting, and reflecting we spoke of the fear of going inside the narrowhole in the ground, and the protective shield the land provided against war.
Opening this window felt like we were providing an opportunity to recirculatethese stories in the complex present.
The land that witnessed these events remains in the trace layers
painted into ephemeral windows. Dirt has an active voice in how land is remembered today, not just as a receptacle for human thoughts but also as a
sanctuary for living things of microscopic proportions. Here I bring together
both the materiality of the dirt and its metaphoric qualities to illuminate its
potential for narration of alternate perspectives on the past. Artist exchanges, dialogue, workshops and community engagement open opportunities for59stories that have been silenced in American narrations of the war to be shared.
Dirt provides foundations for care of diverse forms of life based on community
knowledge. Furthermore, listening to Củ Chi, Temasek and other sites helps toenvision harmonious futures between humans together with more-than-humans.
Listen to Land
Envisioning harmonious futures is a process of remembering our intimacy withdirt amidst the fractured relationship we have developed with it. Encounterswith the late artist Jackie Brookner from 2004 up to her death had a deep impact on the way I think and talk about dirt: “Hidden in the roots of our words
we find what we seem to want to forget — that we are literally the same stuff
as earth”.12 Her approach to earth, water, plants and people is born from a sensitive artistic process of deep listening and reverent action. Collaborating with
scientists, government officials, schools and others it is crucial not to forgetthat humans live among a myriad of living beings engaged in dialogue with theearth. The dirt traces presented here offer a frame for listening to the earth
and the stories contained within it. These stories remind us that dirt is part ofus,13 and we are a part of it.
The works contained in this portfolio engage with structures that resemble formal exercises in color.14 Yet they depart from the certainty of a Western epistemological approach in the acts of asking for permission, including
space for that which is not yet known, as well as borrowing and returning materials to the land. Community workshops, oral histories and consultation withknowledgeable elders grounds these works in a practice of uprooting settler
ontologies. They question the scientific truth of color charts as cultural artifacts
after Knuutila and Johansson15 to see dirt itself as a resource for education
rather than a substance to be placed in a copyrighted system for measuringhue, value, and chroma. This artistic approach aligns with the aims of land education which “offers possibility for decolonizing human relations with land andwater, flora and fauna as well as theoretical opportunities to erase dualisms
between nature and culture”.16 Artworks along with co-creation workshops anddiagrams made together with community members are pedagogical tools forhealing our relationship with nature.
Color charts of the diligent pedologist, a scientist who studies soil, function as an extension of settler-colonial strategies to separate and divide land,albeit on a micro-scale. To inhabit the realm of the future, Goodyear-Ka‘ōpuateaches we need not only to transfer ownership of land to indigenous people,“We need to fundamentally shift the system that structures our relations toland”.17 The practice of asking for permission before borrowing dirt traces andreturning them after exhibitions are over is based on reclaiming love for theland and respect for its protectors. Telling stories about touching and feeling dirt
carefully remind us that we are constantly in conversation with land. Tapping
into the memories of our interconnection with land resists settler narratives andbrings us into deeper harmony with the earth we are part of.
Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Nguyễn Minh Thanh, Huynh Thanh Trang, Đặng Minh Thành, Taye Sirikulchayanont, Lugpliw Junpudsa, Koh Nguang How, Eve Hoon, Michelle Ho, Healoha Johnston, Malia
Akutagawa and Walter Ritte for making these artworks possible as well as Yến Nguyễn Hoàng,
Lim Yi Hui Clara and Misty Hoikaika Mollena for research support.

60 antennae

Endnotes[1] The lexicon in the Asia Pacific region is abundant with terminology including: ‘āina in Hawai‘i,
in Japan,Tanah in Malaysia, Đật in Vietnam and other rich terms relevant to this portfolio. While conscious of terms
including “soil” and “earth,” here a focus is made on the terms “dirt” for its intimate connection with daily lifeand “land” for its indigenous links to place. The brief stories recounted here return value to the everyday term
“dirt” within the familiarity of our immediate surroundings and build upon the foundation of “land” in harmony
with cultural practitioners. For more discussion of these terms, see Toland, Alexandra, Jay Stratton Noller, Gerd
Wessolek, Field to Palette: Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene, (London: CRC Press), 2019 for diverse
perspectives on “dirt,” “soil” and other terms used by artists, scientists and scholars; McCoy, Kate, Eve Tuck andMarcia McKenzie, Land Education: Rethinking pedagogies of place from Indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonizing
perspectives, (New York: Routledge), 2016 for valuable pedagogies of place-based indigenous ways of thinking
with the land; Lund, Karsten, Phantoms in the Dirt, (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Photography), 2014 fora curatorial perspective on dirt traces as incomplete parts of expansive spirits; and Lancaster, Linus, Soils andInterventions, University of Plymouth, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2015, p. 56-60 for discussion of soil vs dirt in rethinking
of Western ontologies through agricultural, activist, and artistic forms of praxis.
[2] Excerpt from remembrance by Walter Ritte of his journal kept while camping on Ka‘aholawe Island in the
1970s during the Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana (PKO) movement to stop the U.S. military missile testing on theisland and rejuvenate native species of plants and animals on the island that successfully ceased bombing in
1993 and has since been reforested and is now utilized by cultural practitioners for ceremonies and education
on Hawaiian knowledge of land. Ritte in conversation with author, Kaunakakai, Molokai, Hawai‘i, August 5, 2017.
[3] McLuhan, T.C., Touch the Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence, (New York: Simon & Schuster), 1971, 8.
[4] Reclaiming Land (2014) artwork by James Jack with Chandra Chandramohan exhibited at Independent
Archive Singapore 2018.
[5] Workshop held as part of an artist residency with Molokai Arts Center for the exhibition Molokai Window
by James Jack with Malia Akutagawa, Walter Ritte, Ric Ornellas, Matt Yamashita and Misty Mollena curated by
Healoha Johnston at Honolulu Museum of Art 25 April – 16 September 2018.
[6] “Culture based not only on the relationship between peoples but more importantly on the profound relationship with the ‘āina.” Akutagawa, Malia, Kauwila Hanchett, Napua Leong, Kahualaulani Mick, Josh Pastrana,
Harmonee Williams, Matt Yamashita, Noelani Yamashita and Todd Yamashita, Hülili: Multidisciplinary Research
on Hawaiian Well-Being Vol.5, Kamehameha Schools, 2008.
[7] In this aim I am indebted to the approach of artist Wu Mali, “The hope is to make people re-search the connection with their land and their lives, to break alienated relationships.” Wu, Mali, “Who is Listening to Whose
Story?”, World Art, 5:1, 2015: 197.
[8] Ho, Michelle. “In Praise of Shadows” Exhibition brochure text, Factory 1611, NTU ADM Gallery 2017.
[9] The distance when flying between California and Vietnam is 7,753 miles; the comparison used here is basedon the “tens of thousands of miles of tunnels” noted on https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/cu-chitunnels retrieved on March 1, 2019.
[10] Original text, “Dưới địa đạo, thậm chí cong có cả khu bệnh xá đủ khả năng đỡ đẻ cho nữ giới” translated
text, “Under the tunnels, there is even an infirmary capable of helping women giving birth.” See https://www.
nguoiduatin.vn/dia-dao-cu-chi-va-nhung-chuyen-lan-dau-cong-bo-ky-cuoiky-uc-bi-hung-cua-nhung-nguoi-condat-thep-a98010.html, accessed March 20, 2019.
[11] The war refers to the period of 1955-1975 known as the “American War” when seen from the Vietnamese pointof view or the “Vietnam War”. The term “Resistance War Against America” often used in Vietnam aptly captures theresilience of the Vietnamese people against foreign aggressors in forms such as the tunnels.
[12] Brookner, Jackie and Maxine J. Levin. “Dirt Dialogue”, in Toland, Field to Palette, p. 295.
[13] Bellacasa, Maria Puig de la, “Re-animating soils: Transforming human–soil affections through science,
culture and community”, The Sociological Review of Monographs, 2019, Vol. 67(2): 391-407.
[14] Reference to Munsell Soil Color Charts. (Baltimore: Munsell Color Company), 1954 used to code soil samples
into a system of letters and numbers.
[15] Knuuttilia, Tarja and Hanna Johannsson, “Hommage à Holmberg/The Pédofil of Boa Vista”, From Landscapeto Laboratory, 2013: 27 and Latour, Bruno, “The Pédofil of Boa Vista: A Photo-Philosophical Montage”, Translated by Bart Simon and Katia Verresen, Common Knowledge, Spring 4(1), 1995: 144-187.
[16] Whitehouse, Hilary, Felecia Watkin Lui, Juanita Sellwood, M.J. Barrett, and Philemon Chigeza, “Sea Country:
navigating Indigenous and colonial ontologies in Australian environmental education,” in McCoy et al. Land
Education, 57.
[17] Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, Noelani. “Protectors of the Future, not Protestors of the Past”, South Atlantic Quarterly,
116, no.1, 2017: 188.

James Jack is an artist who creates work together with people, places and ecological networks. He has developedsocially engaged works for the Setouchi Triennale, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Busan Biennale Sea Art Festival, the Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore, the Fujinoyama Biennale and the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial. He isa member of the World Dirt Association artist collective formed in 2014 with Yoshitaka Nanjo and Shotaro Yoshino
whose exhibits include Niigata Land and Water Festival, SYP Art Projects, Ichihara Art x Mix and the Oku Noto Triennial. His writings have appeared in ArtAsiaPacific, Shima, popular media and art catalogs by Blum & Poe Gallery, The
Contemporary Museum of Hawai‘i and Satoshi Koyama Gallery. Jack was a Crown Prince Akihito Scholar, holds a
PhD in Fine Art from Tokyo University of the Arts and is currently Senior Lecturer in Art Practice at Yale-NUS College
in Singapore.

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