Pera + Flora + Fauna: The Story of Indigenousness and the Ownership of History

About

Commissioner

Nur Hanim Mohamed Khairuddin, General Manager of PORT,Ipoh, Perak State, Malaysia                                   

Curators

Amir Zainorin and Khaled Ramadan

Associate Curators

Annie Jael Kwan and Camilla Boemio

Curatorial advisor

Alfredo Cramerotti

With the support of

Perak State Government, Malaysia; Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture Malaysia; National Art Gallery Malaysia; Tourism Malaysia; Tourism Perak; Chamber of Public Secrets; Laterna Magica Museum, Denmark; Jambatan, Denmark;

Thanks to

Art Events, Dorian Batycka, RogueArt

Exhibitors

Azizan Paiman, Kamal Sabran, Kapallorek Artspace, Kim Ng, Projek Rabak, Saiful Razman, Stefano Cagol

Panelists & Moderator

Alfredo Cramerotti, Annie Jael Kwan, Camilla Boemio, Dorian Batycka, Henry Meyric Hughes, Ong Jo-lene.

Performers

Aida Redza

Venue: Archivi della Misericordia,

Campo de l’Abazia, 3549 Cannaregio, Venezia

Curatorial Statement

2020 was the year of accelerated statue wars. Controversial statues representing coloniality and dark chapters in human history were removed by an uncoordinated global protest movement in an attempt to rewrite human history and bring attention to the narrative of the so-called hidden history, the Indigenous saga.

For some, taking down urban memorials approximated censoring, whitewashing, and potentially forgetting history. According to this view, statues do not cause discrimination and can be used to fight prejudice if put into historical context.

This argument was countered by Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto. In Art of Darkness, Caponetto argues that the aestheticization of Indigenous populations and the propagandist production of photographs, drawings, and written accounts indicate that colonialism found a powerful instrument for capturing the Western imagination through depictions of the Indigenous individual as a dark phantasm to be conquered.

In addition to Caponetto’s account, Sarah A. Radcliffe in Geography and Indigeneity and Bernard C. Perley in Living traditions: a manifesto for critical Indigeneity, both writers call attention to the embodiments, positionalities, and subjectivities of Indigeneity within the broader power dynamics of colonial histories, nationalistic formations, capital expansion, and Indigenous resistance.

Such explorations by Caponetto, Radcliffe and Perley and associated narratives continue to influence the discourse and perception of Indigenousness and Indigenous populations across the globe. Therefore, the many attempts of re-writing stories of Indigenousness independently from the mainstream Western socio-political consciousness remains an ongoing struggle.

The art world, including art events and museum collections across the Western world, are not immune to these discursive views. Until today, what some museums see as artifacts, native cultures regard as part of their beliefs, heritages and traditions that are being interrupted and redefined. This practice pushes them to look at their own history as something exotic and natural, but not cultural.

The fight over the right to keep certain artifacts as part of a museum collection or return them to their native communities has caused museums to become battlefields between different communities. What is seen as artifact worthy in the eyes of museums with colonial collections is regarded by the affected Indigenous people as an invasive and destructive act toward local Indigenous history that undermines the dignity of the colonized culture.

In this respect, contemporary digital modernity has left a considerable impact on the lives of Indigenous populations worldwide. History has no lawyers, but it certainly has witnesses and as the last witnesses, the Indigenous populations and their cultural identities, traditions and heritages across the globe, are in the final stage of disappearance.

As we were writing these words, Cristina Calderón, Chile’s last known Yaghan speaker, died on the 16th of February 2022 aged 93. Calderón was recognized by the National Council of Culture and the Arts as a Living Human Treasure and for many, Calderón represented cultural resistance. She was the last-living full-blooded Yaghan person. Thousands of years before European settlers arrived, the Yaghan people inhabited the tip of South America. Today, some of their customs have endured, but the Yaghan are losing their tribal legends for good.

Indigenous populations across the world are sharing similar socio-political conditions. This includes the Orang Asli (First People – in Malay meaning Original People), the Indigenous population of the Perak region in Malaysia, at least to some extent. In The Orang Asli and the UNDRIP: from rhetoric to recognition, Colin Nicholas describes how Orang Asli toponyms fall into disuse when translated into the national Malay language. However, such place-names are valuable linguistic and Indigenous knowledge resources worthy of preservation as elements of cultural heritage. Affixed to quotidian landscapes, episodes from distant and recent pasts present themselves through names of places that people encounter to and from subsistence areas in the forest. Among these are heritage trees that stand as evidence of Orang Asli history and become part of the toponymic signification system due to their role as place markers.

This approach seems similar to the perception of land and place among other Indigenous people. In Place Theory and Place Maintenance in Indigenous Australia Paul Memmott and Stephen J. Long write that such territories appear as ‘complete places’ that guard against placelessness and encourage the continuation of customary place-specific behaviors.

The constant interruption of the history of Indigenous people everywhere and the diversion of their narratives into a constructed cultural mechanism based on majority-minority relationships, have given birth to a new Indigenous identity. There is an emerging call to consider how Indigeneity is actively constructed and produced in relation to non-Indigenous subjects, institutions, and ontologies, giving attention to power interplays under the prevailing economic, political, and social circumstances. Hence, there has been a reformulation of Indigeneity as a concept that is simultaneously grounded in roots and locality, as well as subjected to modernization and globalization.

The neo-Indigenous identity is a socio-cultural construct in transition. It is an impossible trap between history and modernity. What Indigenous populations are witnessing is not simply an evolution but rather a battle against total identity cancellation or intense identity expansion. 

The Indigenous people of the Malaysian forests, as everywhere else in the world, celebrate their cultural heritage and costumes and are proud of their own outfits and traditions. At the same time, many are wearing modern clothing for a variety of convenient reasons. On occasion, they change from these often donated or self-obtained branded clothes to dress themselves with leaves, feathers, and body paint. This is done, not to celebrate their own feasts, but for what is called the anthropological party. This staging or performing for the lens has become a customary practice amongst Indigenous populations in different parts of the world. The particular performative simulation of becoming native again is in many cases done to please the relentless photographers, artists, journalists, academics, historians, and the list is long.

Although the staging is being filmed and documented on the Indigenous people’s own modern communication gears, we still need to ask if staging has become an expansion of the socio-cultural activities and norms of Indigenous populations across the world?

After the anthropological party the Indigenous people tend to go back to their mobile phones, Western clothing, and semi digital routines. They have become objects of desire, but also objects of necessity and vital documentation under modern living conditions. These materialistic tools of technology in the hands of Indigenous populations have become useful in terms of witnessing their socio-cultural transition between the past and the future.

While the memory and history of the Indigenous populations remain their own, their natural territories and surroundings are shrinking for a variety of political, economic and cultural reasons, at the hands of entities of dominant majorities in almost every country with Indigenous populations.

A recent example is the certain demolition decision of a historic chain of caves in Perak region full of unique cave drawings and figures.

Needless to say, Indigeneity remains one of humanity’s most important living links to history. Despite time and space, Indigeneity still offers ecological wisdom through the ways of living with nature and the environment. In fact, many contemporary scholars are turning to Indigenous thinking and practice as a way of thinking about the healing of our planet from the excess of modern extractivism and production. 

Curating Pera + Flora + Fauna, our project intends to address the story of Indigenousness and the ownership of history by zooming in on the state of Perak and its native population. This is done while knowing in advance that the discourse about Indigenousness and nature is largely affected by mainstream cultural attitudes of industrialized nations, the very nations that contribute to current global environmental problems. This leads us to question how Indigenous populations across the globe can challenge the mainstream documented (art) history written by the non-Indigenous? Can Indigenous populations achieve the liberty to collectively claim “their own history and narratives” antagonizing the dominant discourse?

By inviting 7 artists, art collectives and contributors to Pera + Flora + Fauna our intention is to present a different narrative and an aesthetic experience that builds upon research, knowledge and participation.

Pera + Flora + Fauna is meant to re-imagine nature and Indigenousness in relation to ethics and aesthetics questioning who owns nature and who owns the Indigenous history.

Curators Khaled Ramadan and Amir Zainorin

19 February 2022; Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia.

About Pera + Flora + Fauna

Ownership of Indigenousness and the Social Construction of Nature

Nature – might it only be a state of mind? A dream: an idea inherited from someone who came before; an idea to relate to those who might come after?

That may depend on the social construction of nature. Re-imagining nature and indigenousness in relation to ethics and aesthetics demands a closer look at the state of the interrelations between man and nature. Some might even argue that the aesthetics of natural beauty can become a guide to socio-ethical behaviour and lead to the development of a better cultural persona.

In Art of Darkness, Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto argues that the aestheticization of native populations and the propagandist production of photographs, drawings, and written accounts, especially of African natives, indicate that Colonialism had found a powerful instrument for capturing the Western imagination in depictions of the indigenous as a dark phantasm to be conquered.

Such depictions and associated narratives continue to influence the perception of indigenousness. Therefore, visually capturing and representing nature as seen and understood in indigenous contexts and re-writing stories of indigenousness independently from the Western mainstream socio-political consciousness remains an unachievable dream.

Will this remain just a theoretical possibility or a futuristic romantic vision?

The global aestheticization of the notions of indigenousness and indigeneity are expressed in different ways. There is no consensual agreement on how to ethically or aesthetically document, archive or exhibit the historic narrative of indigenous populations across the globe, including in Malaysia.

Can indigenous populations challenge mainstream history written by the non-indigenous? Can indigenous populations achieve the liberty to collectively claim “their own history and narratives”, antagonising the dominant mainstream discourse? Can practice of indigeneity provide strategies that resist or refuse the homogenizing or divisive violence of nation-states?

Pera + Flora + Fauna intends to address these questions drawing on different perspectives of man, nature, and their interrelation.