Curated screening programme and keynote conversation
Collaborations Afield: Work Across Ecologies and Discipline
Harvard Film Archive, 27 March 2025
Ecological and historical poetics are two major tendencies of Southeast Asian contemporary artists’ cinema. This screening programme honours the important work of the Migrant Ecologies Project and re-situates the cine-poem of Sasithorn Ariyavicha as a prescient practice of ecological imagining.
Among contemporary artists sustaining a durational and politically committed mode of exploring ecological entanglement and human-nonhuman relations in Southeast Asia, Lucy Davis stands as an important instigator. In 2009 she initiated the Migrant Ecologies Project, an ongoing collaborative umbrella for a series of transdisciplinary artistic inquiries whose starting point is, as the artist-professor puts it, “a very particular more-than-human encounter. A patch of urban scrub, an encounter with a squawking in the canopy.” The work featured in this screening programme, {if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves, exemplifies the poetry and the rigour of MEP’s method. “Common for all these stories is that they evolve through processes of rhythmic returns, to the same place..the same bird call.”
At the turn of this century Sasithorn Ariyavicha was a precursor of Thai artists’ cinema. Having graduated from studies in the USA, she returned to Thailand and continued experimenting with analogue and digital modes of making pure cinematic images from fragments of the city and fleeting moments and gestures. At that point, her solitary mode of filmmaking, and the intensely poetic quality of her images, had been associated with the poetic tradition of experimental cinema emphasising individual subjective vision and memory. The turn to ecological poetics among artists’ cinema practices invites another engagement with her major work, Birth of the Seanéma, more attuned to its defamiliarisation of the city film via its poetics of submergence.
This screening programme grew out of May Adadol Ingawanij’s curatorial practice-research project Animistic Apparatus. A strand of this project involves exploring, through curating and writing, Southeast Asian contemporary moving image artists’ creation of animistic, relational, cosmological and ecological forms. As she discusses in her article ‘Cinematic Animism and Contemporary Southeast Asian Artists’ Moving Image Practices,’ this major field of artistic practices can be classified into four main groupings: 1) Interdisciplinary artistic research practices, which usually take the durational form of a long-term and open-ended project revolving around a key ecological theme; 2) Participatory projects responding to environmental issues often situated in non-urban communities and incorporating moving-image production or exhibition as part of their activities; 3) Documentary practices portraying daily local realities of environmental degradation, and people’s efforts to survive and seek prospects in toxic zones; 4) Cinematic animism fabulating tales of relations and communication in existential vulnerability across beings and species, and of the agency of vulnerable humans to know and to relate otherwise.
Screening programme
{if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves
(Migrant Ecologies Projects, 2021, 28mins)
“This film is one part of a long-term engagement with Tanglin Halt, one of Singapore’s oldest social housing estates, which runs alongside a former railway track. The railway was owned by the Malaysian state until 2011, meaning that a ten-meter-wide zone of indeterminate-governance ran
through the heart of Singapore for fifty years, playing host to a fecundity of more-than-human activities, ranging from the informal to the feral. Ornithologists have observed 105 species of birds in this patch. However, the land along the tracks is being repurposed as green corridor park through a new biotech and media hub…Our repeated returns to this contested site aim to trace remaining fragments of calls, echoes, shadows memories and transformative encounters that still animate this zone, like shadows through leaves.
The fragments of calls and voices in this film are drawn from field recordings of birds in the area, interviews with former residents and nature activists and a selection of species-specific, Malay bird pantuns, collated by writer Alfian Sa’at..Our method of representing the absent-presence of birds in this zone involved randomly sourcing online images from competitive bird groups of the 105 bird species in this patch and returning, with OHP transparencies of these images, to the GPS locations where the species were last seen or heard.” (The Migrant Ecologies Project)
The Migrant Ecologies Project is conceptualized by Lucy Davis, together with: Sound Designer, Zai Tang; Cinematographer & Editor, Kee Ya Ting. Editor, Daniel Hui & Design Studio Crop Singapore.
Birth of the Seanéma (Sasithorn Ariyavicha, 2004, 70mins)
Sasithorn edited this black and white silent film from many hours of footage she shot on DV looking intensely at Bangkok streets, aerial views, the shoreline, lapping waves, gestures, figures and faces. An invented alphabet inscription accompanies the film’s slow gliding rhythm. The arrangement of letters and the layering of images tells a fable of the sea as the milieu of all the memories of all the world’s beings. In an interview with film academic and writer Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn shortly after the film’s completion, the artist says of her approach to filmmaking, “I eventually realised that a viable method for me is to record an archive of images first and then subsequently turn those images into film. It’s a process of filmmaking that isn’t determined by a preconceived story or a narrative. The form of the film is determined by my affective response to the surrounding, the milieu, which then becomes film image. For this reason I have to be behind the camera myself. I’m directly relating and communicating with the particular environment I’m in, doing so primarily with the affective images I make.”
Curated by May Adadol Ingawanij
Artists
The Migrant Ecologies Project was founded in 2009 as an umbrella for collaborative, transdisciplinary inquiries into questions of art, ecology and more than human connections, primarily but not exclusively in Southeast Asia.
Lucy Davis is a visual artist, art writer and founder of The Migrant Ecologies Project. Her transdisciplinary practice encircles plant genetics, tree lore and bird song as well as art/science, naturecultures, memory, materiality, narrative environments, and pyscho-ecologies of resilience. She is currently Professor of Artistic Practices in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art at Aalto University, Finland where she serves as Deputy Head of the programme.
Sasitorn Arayavicha is an artist-filmmaker based in Thailand. Her body of work was recently the subject of a retrospective at the 7th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (2025).