Weather as Witness: Political Ecologies of Southeast Asia through a Curatorial Lens

Weather as Witness develops an experimental curatorial method to conceptualise weather as a material witness in the political ecologies of Southeast Asia. Focusing on artistic research processes and the resulting archives that artists generate instead of artworks exhibited, the project advances new curatorial methods of engaging, analysing and publishing with materials generated from artistic research practices and archives as they attend to the political ecologies of Southeast Asia. The project's outcome will be an experimental multimedia publication, which uses curatorial modes of dialoguing, thinking and publishing to index, assemble, and analyse artists' research archives that articulate alternative readings of how weather and the elements constitute Southeast Asia's political ecologies. The project's key aims are: 1) To contribute to the multidisciplinary research agenda of reconceptualising the regionality of Southeast Asia, pivoting from the previously hegemonic notion of Southeast Asia as a Cold War geopolitical construct, and meeting the urgent need to understand the region from an ecological prism; 2) To refine curatorial methods of engaging and dialoguing with artists' processes for purposes of exploring how artistic research produces new knowledge of Southeast Asian political ecologies intersecting politico-economic, sociocultural, and environmental confluences entangled in colonial and Cold War histories; 3) To extend the rich and innovative genealogy of Southeast Asian curatorial research methodologies by focusing on explorations of weather as medium and material.