What makes activism in Southeast Asia ‘real,’ Indonesia labor movements specialist Michele Ford wonders (2013). With a slight twist, the question becomes: What makes it ‘matter’? What are its material manifestations, effects, and meanings across a range of levels, from embodied everyday life to global eco- and biosystems? These are the questions my presentation will address with a focus on environmental protest in Cambodia. Building on the interdisciplinary field of New Materialisms, it will discuss a set of operations by non-governmental organizations and critical contemporary artists with regard to issues of pollution, extractivism, and land grabbing. It will examine the following aspects: the ‘apparatuses’ that make these protest operations visible, intelligible, and ‘measurable’ across different geographical, cultural, and institutional spaces; the sensuous, messy, transitory, and relational aspects of activism and their capacity to unhinge essentialisms and determinisms. By emphasizing the porosity between bodies, objects, and contexts, an analysis of activism through the lens of materiality might enable a different tracing of the practices and productions of Cambodian activists and artists. In terms of theory, the presentation will explore, through this case study, how materialist conceptualizations of agency and causality might contribute a different understanding of the conditions of doing politics in Southeast Asia. Conversely, it will consider the potential of Southeast Asian perspectives to decenter and to decolonize ‘theories of matter’ which, since they are primarily anchored in Western modern intellectual traditions, have so far been little challenged by non-Western and indigenous ontologies.
Bio:
Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier is an art historian and ERC Research Fellow in the project ‘Cultures of Occupation in Twentieth Century Asia’ (COTCA), University of Nottingham, UK. She received her PhD at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and was associate researcher at the university’s Centre for Historical Culture for several years. She has worked as curator and organized exhibitions in Israel, France, Germany, Lithuania, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, and Thailand. She was a Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien and ICI Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin (2018-19), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2012), the Stone Summer Theory Institute at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (2010) and the Theory Department at Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands (2005-2006). She is currently working on her first monograph (‘Beyond skulls: Western visual culture and the memory of the Cambodian genocide’) and a co-edited volume on the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia. She has contributed to essays collections, exhibition catalogs and journals such as Cinéma & Cie, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, Mémoires en Jeu, Journal of Perpetrator Studies, Kunstlicht, and Media, Culture & Society.
Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)
Panel 3: Folk and Creole Epistemologies
3:30-5:30pm HK/SG time / 8:30-10:30am BST / 9:30-11:30am CEST / 3:30-5:30am EDT / 12:30-2:30am PDT