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Fieldwork has a long and contested history across anthropology and other social sciences and has increasingly been adopted within artistic and cultural practice in Southeast Asia and beyond. Describe an artist, practitioner, collective, or project that uses a field-based approach that makes you rethink what it means to conduct fieldwork. What do you find valuable about their method, and what limitations, tensions, or ethical, methodological concerns does it raise? (max 500 words)

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The field requires constant maintenance. Most recently, I am (always) nourished by the practice(s) of Borneo Laboratory, exhibiting the duality of both art, architecture and social practices of reciprocal relationships. Two years ago, I was in Vienna on a rainy cold day that dipped down to 14C in the summer, writing for Process Magazine, a magazine from KL, about the regenerative and transdisciplinary practice of Borneo Laboratory. Wendy, the founder, moved back to Kuching from London, teaching in Taichung, Taiwan, hosting and maintaining different spaces for her own design and architectural practice, she holds a tenuous link between her own design practice of digital fabrication and parametric in tandem with understanding Bornean indigenous patterns, material and construction.

Today, I am writing from Borneo Laboratory, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia from the wafting haze. Being confronted with the newest dust emerging from the polycrisis of our time, I am reminded of the tensions of modernity and our technocractic ways. Borneo Laboratory had to shift two exhibitions and delay several works as the ash spews from Anak Krakatau and the surrounding volcanos, the water shortages in Pontianak, the haze drifting throughout Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and The Philippines . Our bodies cough out the harsh chemicals arising from the haze. We are the air purifiers of our spaces, as we close our windows to no avail.

I write from the physiological and climate conditions, as it has affected Wendy, Nadrah, Nazli and myself at her (new) current space and practice. Instead, her fieldwork continues onward, by getting to know the histories embedded in the building, as a new artists-in-residence comes to Kuching. The project is led by Nadrah, an intern from the NUS art history programme, put together a publication tracing the ethnographic histories of their current premises that takes two floors above a kopitiam (coffee shop) in an older, light industrial district, adjacent to the city centre.

Wendy, the founder of Borneo Laboratory, described a moment of discernment. During crisis, when uprising emerges, what happens next? Where does the intention of each movement begin from? The use of resilience begs the question of supportive systems we rely on, but for how much longer can we be self-sufficient and resilient for as people bearing the weight of uneven layers of oppression.

In a essay, I wrote about Regenerative Practitioner course where I first physically met Wendy. She brought our community to visit Bau, where I visited again on this trip. A Bidayuh-Hakka community welcomed us two years ago and cooked with us. This time I was called into the forests by elders practicing an intergenerational tattooing history, where they held the patterns of the tribes and peoples retelling stories, symbols, and meaning making with the lands.

Without participating in the previous programme, entitled ‘ Future Positive – Wisdom Weaving Regenerative Design,’ I would not be compelled to listen to the call back into the same forests that I first encountered. Through the elders, we learned about their cultural practices, by exploring alongside them. It was an experiential fieldwork, with community members telling their connections with the lands and how it has changed. They are now the epicentre of the haze, where the forests burning wafts into their houses and lands, affecting their everyday lives. Living close to the Indonesian border, the field becomes a site of change. Borneo Laboratory traces these changes, reworking our relationship with knowing a contingent context, bounded beyond the borders of the nation-state. It tells a story that is disappearing and remakes new connections, slowly, but surely.