The Forest as Assemblage: In Conversation with Pujita Guha for the Forest Curriculum

Premised on a cultural-activist ethos, the Forest Curriculum was founded in 2018 by artist-curator Abhijan Toto and media theorist Pujita Guha. Working through collaborative thinking, the Curriculum uses “zomia” as a potential curatorial ethic in the exercise of “para(sitic) institutionality.” Coined in 2002 by Willem van Schendel (and later popularised by James C. Scott), “zomia” refers to a belt of forested land that stretches across parts of South, East and Southeast Asia (thus spanning multiple countries), which is absent from national histories and state cartographies. Formed by conscious refugees in anarchic refusal of state actors, zomia comprises a transnational zone with a vast linguistic diversity, and constitutes modes of living and kinship that the state has been unable to erase or appropriate. Thus, located outside the scope of the state, these forests also become a space where pre-modern/indigenous cosmologies and beliefs manifest. The Forest Curriculum thinks about the natureculture formation of zomia as one from which to understand organisation, identity, collaboration and “fugitive forms of knowledge,” i.e., non-extractive modes of epistemic transaction.

The Curriculum locates itself in the critique of the Anthropocene and attendant discourses around planetary habitations by looking at the forest as an assemblage. The forests constituting zomia are a space of predation (with both colonial and modern histories of genocide), which effectively strips the notion of its romantic connotations as a space of refuge from the state. Permeated with shape-shifting identities, zomia is a space of porosity between state forces and ethnic communities. This often materialises as transmigrations and somatic entanglements in the works of filmmakers such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Lav Diaz, which attest to the cotemporaneous existence of multiple states of identity; the expanded sense of location thus manifests in the media that emerges from the region. In this conversation, Pujita Guha for the Forest Curriculum expands on the impulse to use zomia as a fulcrum for their practice, and working with a range of stakeholders to produce systems of shared knowledge and resources.

^{(Featured Image: Installation piece by An Itinerant Bestiary in collaboration with Forest Curriculum at Busan Sea Art Festival 2021. The black-and-white flags bear the entangled narratives of opium and coffee, elephant counters and shamanistic figures, all as non-codifiable signifiers of resistance to statist power; accompanying texts on the flags fabricate an anti-map for visitors to meander through these Zomian realms. A dense soundscape of insects, fungi, digital voices, urban construction, amphibians, and pigeons deepens this non-/human assemblage. Image courtesy of the Forest Curriculum.)}

Recorded on 21 February 2022.

To read more about Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work, please click here.