<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>
Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan, Singapore
"Whispering Secrets into Trees, The Poetics of Moving Earth, Terra as Palimpsest" are starting points and the first iteration of <earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, a broader body of work and long-term collaborative research project looking into environmental histories, infrastructures overlaid on spirit paths, interspecies ecologies, extractive capitalist urbanization, archival fragments, moving, shapeshifting walking paths through human built landscapes alongside what lies below and above these trails and coordinates.
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest> by Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan are invitations and invocations to see with skin, hear with our feet, feel our way through spatial interruptions and somatically attend to sound at points of transit, change and threshold-crossing.
How are we listening to each other, to our surroundings, our environments, our bodies, our breath, our organs, to creaturely companions, to reconfigured rhythms of time and disembodied sounds from virtual realms? How are we unlearning and re-negotiating our relationship to time, to routines, to spatiality, presence and sentience in space? What invocatory technologies of the present are lending themselves to these new planetary questions and shapeshifting worlds we are building, sensing and mapping?
Each cumulative form of this long-term project is an invitation to reframe hegemonic cartographies, to conjure the ecologies of selves within the seen and unseen, and make memory maps from meandering through the homely and strange, the uninhabitable, the chthonic, the otherworlds and more-than-human worlds that we share habits and habitats with.
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, 2021
Single channel video, 17.37 minutes
Additional Notes about the Work
For the first incarnation of this work, my collaborators and I were responding to the prompt of how the pandemic had reframed the forest and multi-species entanglements, if it did at all? While we can argue that computation systems have enabled forests and ecologies to be made legible in new ways, we had unanswered questions on the unofficial uses and memories of green spaces within an island city state like Singapore, and the multiple and broad breadth of intelligences that mark and shape these spaces.
Through this work, we were keen to engage more closely with worldmaking practices, practices framed as traditional, accessing embodied memory as archive, paying attention to the sound of ants, the sacred meanings of earth mounds, soil as a system of burrows and tunnels, trees as vessels and nodes, terra as palimpsest and (exhumed) chthonic worlds. We also wish to acknowledge, credit and give thanks to all non-human, creaturely companions and guardians of spirit paths who are co-authors of this work. This work has also examined ways to experience space/site in polysensorial ways, across and beyond the 5 senses that ‘western’ traditions have labelled as ‘sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing’. We are interested in exploring ways the senses are differentially and culturally conceived and how this presents expanded divergent modes of relating to the vast ecologies of selves that attempt to thrive and survive in any given space.
In addition, these questions have prompted our on-going research:
What is our present day relationship to the land, the earth, soil, to creaturely forms in all of their guises, to the seen and unseen, to habitats that we deem peculiar? What are the entry points from which we can talk through and listen to the ways knowledge is produced, transmitted, consumed, perpetuated, handed down orally, documented, decontextualized, stolen?
How do we make sense of the ever expansive realms, worlds, layers of accumulated data, information that is beyond human comprehension? How perceptible are we to these energy flows, both quantifiable and instinctively, intuitively, viscerally felt and sensed through our ecosystems, machines, selves and spaces? How do we imagine these future worlds we would like to breathe into and walk with? How can we continue to sustain and create practices of care for, remember, echo-locate, distance-sense, give attention to and speak with the myriad forms, shapes, guises of non-human worlds, the spirit loci, tutelary spirits, the creatures and trees that are older than our buildings? When we’re walking through compacted earth paths, how are we learning to enter, pass through, inhabit and share spaces with the whole body listening?
Excerpt from Script
Where was the first forest where you met your first migratory birds, eagles, tree snakes, reticulated pythons, whip snakes, black spitting cobras, iguanas, fire ants, millipedes, centipedes, phasmids, arachnids and ground beetles? When was your first memory of crossing human-created thresholds? Where might you have met other residents, other keepers of the forest —the ones who perch on trees or sit on park benches, and disappear when you blink. What is your first memory of a forest, a tree, soil, earth, dirt, places where people refuse to step on because there’s no concrete? Can you say the names, see, hear, smell, sense all the bodies and beings who have resided, occupied, moved through, been displaced, rehomed, rerouted, uprooted in this exact spot where you stand?
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, 2021
© Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, 2021
© Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, 2021
© Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, 2021
© Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, 2021
© Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, 2021
© Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, 2021
© Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, 2021
© Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, 2021
© Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, 2021
© Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, 2021
© Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan
<earth, land, sky and sea as palimpsest>, 2021
© Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan
Zarina Muhammad is an artist, educator and researcher whose practice is deeply entwined with a critical re-examination of oral histories, ethnographic literature and other historiographic accounts about Southeast Asia. Working at the intersections of performance, installation, text, ritual, sound and moving image, she is interested in the broader contexts of myth-making, haunted historiographies and role of the artist as “cultural ventriloquist” who lends polyphonic voices to data-driven systems, multi species entanglements and shapeshifting worlds. She has been working on a long-term interdisciplinary project on Southeast Asia’s provisional relationship to the otherworldly, spectrality, ritual magic and the immaterial against the dynamics of global modernity and the social production of rationality. She has presented her work and been involved in projects across Asia Pacific and Europe.
Zachary Chan is a graphic designer, composer, sound designer and gamelan musician. His musical roots are based in central Javanese gamelan music and he has written music and designed sound for experimental films, plays, video games, storytelling and art installations.
As a gamelan musician, he has been performing for over seven years with local Javanese and Balinese gamelan ensembles. As a composer and sound designer, he has been regularly putting work out since 2013 which has been performed and shown both locally and abroad. He is the co-founder of graphic design studio crop.sg.
