Breathing in a World of Water // Calling the Earth to Witness
10 to 19 January 2025

Breathing in a World of Water // Calling the Earth to Witness © Breathing in a World of Water // Calling the Earth to Witness

ABOUT

Expanding on an ongoing and long term research and audio-visual-performance project, BREATHING IN A WORLD OF WATER // CALLING THE EARTH TO WITNESS is a multidisciplinary transnational project looking into the ways calendrical systems, ritual theatre, elemental forces, geo-spirited landscapes, magnetic fields,  terraforming technologies, maritime arteries, trickster tides, gravitational pulls/resistance, lightlessness and grief work have shaped habitats, histories, cultures, societies, economies and art-science activisms with a focus on Southeast Asia and global south narratives and situatedness.

Across the Malay archipelago there is a belief that one must touch soil with their lips, in order for the land to recognise you; a mutual acknowledgement that land, a living shapeshifting creature of deep time is ungovernable and resists modern concepts of sovereignty. In tracing environmental wisdoms and polycosmologies marked by intergenerational and transcultural understandings of kinship, healing traditions, biodiversity and local/indigenous knowledge, the project draws on collective/ collaborative knowledge making that offers invitations to make space for multi-sensorial attentiveness to the gently ferocious other/more-than-human ecologies and indocile landscapes we pass through and inhabit. What wisdoms and lessons may be drawn by creaturely kin, microhabitats, the seasonal rhythms of living spiritscapes, the lifeforms and unseen worlds that persist, survive, regenerate at all costs? How can we reflect on the ways we learn, create pathways for, make legible and hold space for grief, resistance, softness and ferocity in this world? What are the ways of being, leaning in, burrowing and allowing submergence as a way out of terrestrial bias? What might we witness and what is animated when we situate ourselves in thresholds that asks for your whole body to listen, to move, to act even when in deep opacities?

Alongside several long-term artist and research collaborators, the residency will serve as a point of gathering and space for multidisciplinary sharing, live art performances and other artistic activations.

Public Events

10 – 19 JANUARY

Open Studio

11 January, Saturday, 1 to 6pm
12 January, Sunday, 3 to 6pm
18 January, Saturday, 3 to 6pm
19 January, Sunday, 12 to 6pm*
* There will be a combined Jamming Session with Ruby Jayaseelan, Eswandy Sarip, Nusantara Theatrics (Jamil Schulze + Lian Sutton) and other invited artists

No registrations needed, walk-ins are welcome.

Workshops

Rooted Protection: The Botanical as Living Talisman

With Wild Dot + Hafiz Rashid
10 January, Friday, 7.30 to 9.30pm

Taking inspiration from divinatory systems, folkloric archives, and culturally specific wisdoms, this performance lecture and hands-on workshop invites participants to engage with plants as living talismans and active agents in a shared multispecies world. Unfolding through tactile and sensory prompts, the session reflects on the knowledge systems embedded in botanical presences and ecologies—knowledge that is orally transmitted, visually conjured, ritualised, or made material as spaces of protection and healing.

Wild Dot is a natural art studio from Singapore started by Shirin Rafie and Liz Liu, who hold backgrounds in illustration and ecology respectively. Through their combined interests, they specialize in artmaking with found pigments and fibers abundant in the spaces they work with, and also sharing their findings through designing playful experiences for other people. Their shared intention is to observe how (art)making can be an accessible way for more people to learn about the plants growing around them, and also deconstructing the material of the everyday object, ultimately working towards reducing their own reliance on mass-commercialized making tools and materials.

Hafiz Rashid is an experienced museum docent who has been volunteering with the National Heritage Board since 2013. He is also a storyteller who has performed at various events and venues such as Storyfest at the Arts House as well as Singapore Heritagefest. In 2021, he received the Teman Warisan award in recognition of his dedication and contribution to the Malay arts and heritage sector. His research interests includes learning about the history, culture, folklore and languages of the Malay Archipelago (Nusantara) with a special focus on textiles.

Visit here to register.

Not all Answers Stay the Same
Workshop led by Zarina Muhammad
11 January, Saturday, 1 to 2.30pm

Across the Malay archipelago there is a belief that one must touch soil with their lips, in order for the land to recognise you; a mutual acknowledgement that land, a living shapeshifting creature of deep time is ungovernable and resists modern concepts of sovereignty. In tracing environmental wisdoms and polycosmologies marked by intergenerational and transcultural understandings of kinship, healing traditions, biodiversity and local/indigenous knowledge, the session draws on collective/ collaborative knowledge making that offers invitations to make space for multi-sensorial attentiveness to the gently ferocious other/more-than-human ecologies and indocile landscapes we pass through and inhabit.

Visit here to register.

Artists' Sharing

Whispering Secrets to Trees

With jee chan and stefan pente
​​​​​​12 January, Sunday, 6 to 7.30pm

Whispering Secrets to Trees is a work-in-process screening of jee chan’s current film project o pokok  as well as a chat among artists Zarina Muhammad, jee chan and stefan pente on their forthcoming collaborative audio-visual-performance project

o pokok is a series of vignettes depicting a haunting in Greenhouse C at the Berlin Botanic Gardens which, as the Gardens website describes, contains “tropical crop plants and other useful plants, altogether about 250 species, arranged according to main uses.” Taking the film as a departure point, the conversation unravels histories of displacement, failures of the anthropocentric holocene and the botanic gardens as site of European colonial extraction.

jee chan is an artist and choreographer whose work asks questions surrounding the displaced body and what it can perform. Their practice is concerned with translating the unspeakable, the unknowable and the forgotten, addressing themes of grief, loss and deep historical violence, particularly within the context of island Southeast Asia. jee is currently an artist fellow of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadler’s Wells, London. They live between Singapore and Berlin.

stefan pente (all pronouns) works with performance, installation, painting and video. with her work, he tries to create terrains of de-familiarization, giving weight to the seeing of things as they appear and not as what we have learned them to be. abstraction and non-representation are steps in the process of clearing and confusing gaze and imagination. purging themself from preconceptions, re-calibrating and re-directing. with a focus on memory—individual as well as collective—inherited as well as self-collected—stefan delves into the effects of embodied memories. developing performative as well as sculptural practices of extraction transference and containment.

No registration needed, walk-ins are welcome.

The Artist

Zarina Muhammad is an artist, educator, and researcher whose practice critically re-examines oral histories, ethnographic literature, and historiographic narratives of Southeast Asia. Working at the intersections of performance, text, installation, ritual, sound, moving image, and participatory practice, her work explores the enmeshed contexts of ecocultural cosmologies, identities and interactions, myth-making, haunted historiographies and geo-spirited landscapes. Her long-term interdisciplinary project investigates Southeast Asia’s evolving relationship with spectrality, ritual magic, polysensoriality, and the immaterial, examining these themes against the backdrop of global modernity, the social production of rationality, and transcultural exchanges of knowledge. Her work has been widely presented at international biennales and institutions, including the FotoFest Biennial 2024: Critical Geography, the 2nd Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, the 7th Singapore Biennale, and the 3rd Lahore Biennale. Her work has most recently been presented at Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum, Wonderfruit, and a solo presentation at the Singapore Pavilion—curated by Shubigi Rao—within the ASEAN pavilions of the 15th Gwangju Biennale. Zarina is also the recipient of the 2022 IMPART Art Prize.

The Space

136 GOETHE LAB is a new project space at the Goethe-Institut Singapore. Housed in the former library and reading room, the space is intended as a response to the need for physical spaces for the arts, and an ongoing conversation with the public and arts community in Singapore.

BREATHING IN A WORLD OF WATER // CALLING THE EARTH TO WITNESS is supported as part of the open call for 136 GOETHE LAB, which invited applicants to activate the space with a group proposal.