Acts of Life is a month-long critical research residency that will take place across two locations – Manila and Singapore. The programme involves a rigorous line-up of site visits, tours, workshops and public lectures led by esteemed scholars, artists and practitioners across diverse fields, in tune with the programme’s thematic focus on exploring the entanglements between nature and culture, art and technology.
Bridges, connection and contradictions will be addressed via various artistic and interdisciplinary contributions on the polar topics of nature, culture and the city and digitalization. An intact ecological environment as well as an intact urban coexistence is characterised by cultural diversity, which in turn favours and promotes the creation of information and knowledge. Can these common features be brought together productively? Is it possible to overcome the contradiction between urban life and sustaining an ecological environment? Nature and the city act as a source of inspiration for knowledge production and cultural practices: They are both an origin and a treasure trove of knowledge. How can these insights be harnessed, visualised, passed on and preserved?
Man has always adapted and used knowledge from nature, which serves as the basis for culture, technology and development. Nature is the source of knowledge and the starting point for numerous cultural technologies. A pivotal ecological phenomenon of our time, the so-called “Sixth extinction / Anthropocene extinction”, therefore also describes a cultural development.
The interaction of science, technology and art/culture is intended to set new directions, point out content-related perspectives and approaches, not only for stakeholders, discourse leaders, scientists and artists, but also, for a broad public whilst simultaneously taking into account the multi-perspective approach of the topic range.
Working from within the spatial-temporal localities of Southeast Asia itself, Acts of Life is strategically positioned to unpack the many complexities existing within recently-popularised tropes of Asian futurity perpetuated across various channels. At the heart of the residency programme is a commitment to critical research of the rapidly changing landscape of the current geological age, brought on by the rampant urbanisation and digitisation of contemporary (post-)human life.
