INTRODUCTION

Southeast Asia’s landscapes are layered with the residues of extraction. Plantations, mines, canals, and ports were never simply natural or economic sites; they were technologies that reordered soil, bodies, and relations. Monocultures scripted land into grids, logistics carved rivers into conduits, and labour migration turned human lives into fungible flows. These infrastructures endure as ecological scars and social legacies, shaping how communities negotiate territory and memory today.

Contemporary artists in the region are not only confronting these extractive histories. They are also proposing alternative futures grounded in kinship and queer ecology – where soil, rivers, food, and plants are collaborators rather than resources. Here, “queer” is not only about sexuality or identity but about the method: a refusal of extractive logics, a disruption of linear temporality, and a practice of making kin across human and more-than-human worlds.¹

This essay reflects on how such relational technologies emerge through art and curatorial practice. Drawing on projects curated by the author – Siam Reversed (2025), Savour the Canvas (2025), the Kopisan Cultural Mapping Workshop (2019/2022), and the long-term inquiry River Cities (2016–2023) – it examines how communities metabolize grief, dispossession, and ecological precarity into gestures of care and solidarity. Juxtaposed with practices by Yee I-Lann, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Minia Biabiany, and Marwa Arsanios, these examples demonstrate how Southeast Asian art reconfigures the entanglement of technology and ecology: from extraction to kinship.
 

PLANTATION AS TECHNOLOGY: EDIBLE MEMORIALS AND DISPLACEMENT

The plantation has long been theorized as a modern technology: one that standardized not only crops but also bodies, temporalities, and subjectivities. Sylvia Wynter and Édouard Glissant have argued that the plantation system produced monocultures of both land and thought, reorganizing societies around extractive repetition.²

The demolition of the Last Siamese House in Pulau Tikus, Penang (2025) exemplifies how this plantation logic persists through urban redevelopment.
 

Siam Reversed, a culinary memorial staged by Thai artist Anuwat Apimukmongkon, responded to this loss by transforming food into a medium of collective remembrance.

At a long table, participants encountered dishes such as bunga kantan fritters and fermented rice, each paired with stories of household economies, temple circuits, and diasporic labour.

Here, the table functioned as counter-technology: a site for polyphonic memory instead of monocultural erasure. Food became an archive and gesture, metabolizing displacement into shared care. In Donna Haraway’s sense, this was a “sympoietic” act – world-making through eating, attentive to kinship across humans, ancestors, and plants.³

FOOD AS ECOLOGICAL ARCHIVE: FESTIVALS AND KITCHENS

If plantations embody extractive technologies, kitchens and dining tables are ecological archives. Savour the Canvas, a proposed food-art festival in George Town (2025), explored cuisine as a medium that carries the weight of land and sea labour while appearing as daily sustenance. Each ingredient – palm oil, rubber by-products, dried anchovies – was treated as an archival witness to plantation and fishery economies.

Through edible installations, performative dinners, and open-access recipe sheets, the project framed food as a civic pedagogy. Audiences would encounter cuisine not as consumption but as testimony, where taste linked directly to histories of soil, sea, and migrant work.
By translating land-based histories into sensory and communal acts, the festival would destabilise the binary between “technology” and “ecology.” The kitchen emerges as both: a site where logistical chains, multispecies dependencies, and human memory intersect. As Mel Y. Chen suggests, such material-affective practices unsettle hierarchies, allowing food to be recognized as infrastructure – at once ecological and political.⁴

MAPPING AFTER-EXTRACTION: COMMONS AND COMMUNITY MEMORY

If food metabolizes history inwardly, mapping externalizes it across space. The Kopisan Cultural Mapping Workshop (2019, 2022), conducted in a former tin-mining town in Perak, Malaysia, foregrounded how rural communities re-narrate landscapes after extraction. Elders and youth collaborated to draw maps that layered household geographies with historic mining diagrams, producing hybrid cartographies of memory.

These maps became technologies of repair. They visualized what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has described as “inalienable relations to land,”⁵ here reframed within a Malaysian-Chinese “new village” where tenure, commons, and memory remain contested. The workshop emphasized mapping not as data capture but as relational practice – closer to Glissant’s “right to opacity,” where community knowledge resists full translation into state or market terms.⁶

Through this process, soil and riverbeds emerged as agents of continuity: holding both the scars of extraction and the possibility of renewal. Community mapping thus operated as an ecological technology, producing commons where official redevelopment narratives sought erasure.

RIVERS AND COASTS AS WITNESS: CLIMATE PRECARITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Rivers are infrastructures of both memory and precarity. The long-running River Cities project (2018–2019) traced how jetties, markets, and shorelines organize social and labour life along Malaysia’s coasts. Public talks and exhibitions in Klang and Macau foregrounded rivers as “memory corridors” bearing the imprints of port work, fishing economies, and tidal rhythms.

Today these sites confront the slow violence of climate change: rising seas threaten Penang’s Clan Jetties (Preserving Legacies, 2025), transforming once-vibrant migrant waterfronts into precarious heritage zones. Here, rivers testify both to colonial and diasporic histories and to contemporary ecological collapse. Rob Nixon’s notion of “slow violence” helps frame these conditions as accumulative, attritional, and often invisible until crisis emerges.⁷

Art practices such as Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s maritime films resonate with these inquiries. His essays on memory and the sea frame oceans as archives of war, diaspora, and survival. In conversation with local curatorial experiments, these works reveal how technologies of dams, ports, and maritime logistics remain inseparable from ecologies of tides, mangroves, and rising waters.

SPECULATIVE QUEER ECOLOGIES: MULTISPECIES KINSHIP AND REPAIR

Beyond memorial and mapping, Southeast Asian artists and curators increasingly experiment with speculative ecologies that reconfigure relations between human and more-than-human worlds. The author’s curatorial open call proposal Soil Is Not Silent (KADIST Paris Fellowship, 2026) frames soil itself as a witness, holding colonial scars yet also enabling generative futures.

Artists such as Yee I-Lann, through her collaborative tikar weaving projects in Sabah, Malaysia, propose mat-making as a practice of kinship – linking communities, tidal histories, and collective seating. Minia Biabiany’s cane and wind installations, or Marwa Arsanios’ films on women-led cooperatives, similarly treat plants and land as political actors.

These practices resonate with Haraway’s call to “make kin, not babies.”⁸ They suggest that queerness – understood as method rather than identity – is about resisting extractive genealogies, embracing opacity, and enacting kinship across species and timescales. In this sense, queer ecology becomes both speculative and reparative: a practice of building solidarities otherwise.

CONCLUSION: FROM EXTRACTION TO KINSHIP

Across these projects and practices, a common thread emerges: art in Southeast Asia reframes the entanglement of technology and ecology not as opposition but as relation. Plantations, kitchens, maps, and rivers are revealed as infrastructures that bind soil, labour, and community. Yet, through edible memorials, participatory maps, and speculative kinship, artists transform these infrastructures into relational technologies – platforms for care, repair, and solidarity.

Soil, rivers, and plants are no longer passive backdrops but active collaborators. They witness histories of dispossession while sustaining gestures of renewal. By moving from extraction to kinship, Southeast Asian art invites publics into shared acts of study and responsibility, where ecology becomes co-creator and technology becomes multispecies.

In this reorientation, queer ecologies offer not only critique but also possibility: ways of inhabiting damaged landscapes with care and solidarity. The silent soil speaks through art, urging us toward futures rooted not in extraction, but in kinship.