Stage 1: The search for shared materials ecologies to build Arts Collectives in Malaysia

Research Question: To elucidate how the shared material ecology of mutual support or gotong royong is activated through material flows to build the architecture of arts collectives

By Clarissa Lim Kye Lee

Slide 1

The search for shared material ecologies to build arts collectives in Malaysia

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Today we are migrating collectively to Malaysia, part of the Malay Archipelago as demarcated by the Wallace Line, segmenting peninsular Malaysia and Borneo with Sulawesi of Indonesia.

Malaysian arts collectives sit in between a globalized call to enter the international art world and attending to the public on the ground around us (Becker 2008). Often engaging in community arts practice, collectives tend to their neighbors by offering shared civic spaces, a limited resource in many urban contexts.

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Typically housed in underused as-found spaces, a design process begins by looking for affordable materials, crafts people, and collective building for their community arts practice. Pictured here is COEX@Kilang besi, an arts collective of collectives in Georgetown, Penang, the north west island off of peninsular Malaysia in a balmy constant summer.

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With a shared sub-tropical ecology, the hard wood, is used for vernacular construction, is reclaimed and collected by a variety of pickers of whom collect such material from disused railway quarters, saw mills or vernacular village houses. Instead, this research describes the circulation of collection, distribution and adaptation to phase 1 of the architectural process.

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I’m interested to elucidate how the shared network of mutual support or gotong royong is activated through material flows, to build the architecture of arts collectives.

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There are three parts to the conversation today: Part 1: Understanding arts collectives and gotong-royong

Part 2: introduction of COEX as the case study

Part 3: The material affect of mutual support (gotong royong) and the construction of arts collectives

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