Photo by Selina Chen

There are constantly a negotiation of relations. First and foremost, these tools are not activated by only me. Making Mamak was conducted with five arts collectives, funded by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, set in Malaysia, presented and designed as a blueprint by Constant Variable.

Making Mamak is a workshop based on interrogating the spatial implications of arts collective spaces. Arts collectives and the space they occupy are often seen as two things, but here I toe the lin in between the two to give sentience to the space. The space itself has a spirit, a collective member.

It is a constellation of relations, a rhizomic conception of the mycelium with grounds us on the earth. It is the act of speaking nearby, and besides an idea, never for the collectives (Trinh T. Minh-ha wrote about speaking nearby, besides, and next to ideas). A constant flow of speaking in between an inside < > outside. This intraflow is where my work swims.

Making Mamak in Montreal

The two tools presented today are:

Workshop

As an intersubjective curator situated in between all the sets of relations, to begin constructing a tool decidedly meant I am put in the seat of decision making, the seat of translating ideas between languages which are often untranslatable, but embedded in the essence of culture of southeast asia and Malaysia. It is rather, to build kinship and care between the CCA to the collectives in Malaysia. To conspire, to gossip and translate these conversations into the working language, English.

This leads to the first part of workshop building:

1. Build the same vocabulary:
   1. Gotong Royong - Collective practice of mutual assistance where the commons and collective action is robust, thick and supportive. Where trust is given, for a moment.
   2. Aunties and Uncles
   3. Archipelagic thinking - glissant writes extensively about how the creolisation of multiple cultures should be unexpected. It is to consider the malay archipelago as a constellation of relations between Indonesia and the kingdom of Siam. It is to map a layered palimpsest of ideas beyond the colonial borderlands that are reinforced today in a state of post-colony.

In this intersubjective position, I am able to hold all these relations and blur in-between the outside and the inside.

The construction of the workshop includes all the specifics. The research of arts collectives always inquired in three scale:

1. Nation state - The relationship between arts collectives and documenting
2. Neighbourhood - to identify the uncles and aunties
3. Building - to think through architectural scale to reconsider how the construction was designed, built and by who

This means the curation of the collectives, who to invite, and where the workshop will be placed. But I remember the first question I considered, is what food and when is food being served. The second is to consider the holidays of the multicultural nation that Malaysia entailed. The workshop was held in this year May, and this coincides with harvest festivals, Eid or Hari Raya, etc.