Space Invaders:

On Dark Matter & the Oceanic Turn

Hana Qugana &

Simon Layton

The cosmic ocean, the great expanse, the final frontier—space has assumed many lives and temporalities, holding within it the vast entirety of unknown pasts and speculative futures. In the vaunted ‘age of discovery’, sailors sent to chart alien worlds—Venus as it crossed the Sun; or the equipoised continent of a ‘global south’—encountered Pacific cosmologies in which the sea and the sky were one. In this collision of epistemologies, it was upon oceans that people reimagined humanity under the stars. This paper ventures through different disciplinary wormholes to consider the interplay between human agency and celestial gravity, and the forces they impart over minds and matter respectively. It considers science’s search for ‘dark matter’ in the ocean of space as analogous to the historian’s pursuit of subaltern lives—acts, experiences and events that elude our observation, yet which can be perceived by the archival distortions manifesting around them. Following Eric Tagliacozzo’s ongoing work on the ‘ghosts in the machine’ of empire, and Benedict Anderson’s anarcho-Melvillian concept of ‘political astronomy’, the paper moves between the Pacific and Southeast Asia in search of lost, forgotten, and untraceable archives—archives that remain at once alien and Indigenous, futurist and postcolonial.

Hana Qugana is Lecturer in Global History at the University of Sussex, UK. Her research focuses on the postcolonial politics of ethnogenesis, ecology and civil society in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. She is currently preparing a monograph exploring tensions endemic to the Global South between cosmopolitanism and nation building, development and conservation, and democracy and dictatorship through oral histories, multimedia and print culture of Philippine educational publishing.

Simon Layton is Lecturer in Early Global History at Queen Mary University of London, where he teaches on Indian and Pacific Ocean history. His work explores sea power and maritime violence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, considering specifically how discourses of piracy developed within oceanic spaces of empire. His forthcoming book is entitled Piratical States: British Imperialism in the Indian Ocean world.

Carried by Currents:

Sea-centric Art Caring Beyond Borders

Wei-Hsiu TUNG &

James JACK

This socially engaged art project co-created with students, teachers and collaborators re-imagines connections through participatory artmaking along the coasts of where we live now. Rather than through the dominant narratives of historical geographic knowledge we turn (return) to the Current itself as teacher, connecting us with other islanders through our senses before and throughout the pandemic as our actions are increasingly localized. We are learning from the flow of the Kuroshio Current that runs throughout Austronesia, while allowing creative storytelling to shape our knowledge and understanding. We put the ever-flowing ocean after (Hau‘ofa 2008) resisting the “supremacy of land-based cultures” (Andaya 2006) thereby our praxis rides upon large waves of the past alive in the complexity of the present. We work towards highlighting socially-engaged art projects in Asia Pacific to help people to rediscover the cultural interflow while rethinking the connections or fate of the region. Artists are aware of the potential of art for opening up imagination and going into real worlds (Thompson 2015) influence people for sensitive and controversial issues such as the unseen colonial history and ecological justice. Our micro actions actively resist colonial ways of thinking through intimate encounters in a slow, caring manner focused on expansion of indung, or interconnected consciousness (Maulina et al 2019). Actions continuing now as we share materials, letters and stories with each other along with the movement of tides, with humans non-human species, it is vital to see how art can go into multi-worlds and bring transformations.

Wei-Hsiu Tung is Associate Professor of Theory of Art & Design at National University of Tainan, Taiwan. In 2010-2011 she was Research Fellow of Public Art at the Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture & Design, London. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Visual Art Practice (Taylor & Francis), Culture and Dialogue (Brill) and Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Intellect). Book publications include Art for Social Change and Cultural Awakening: An Anthropology of Residence in Taiwan (Lexington Books, 2013) and The Challenge of Aesthetics: Social Practice in Contemporary Art (Artist Publishing, 2019).

James Jack is an American Asian artist engaging in layered histories of place to achieve positive change through community-led initiatives. Exhibits include Setouchi Triennale, Busan Biennale, CCA Singapore, Honolulu Museum of Art and Echigo-Tsumari Triennale. He completed a doctorate at Tokyo University of the Arts, was an artist fellow at Social Art Lab in Fukuoka, Georgette Chen Fellow in Singapore and founding director of the artist-in-residence program at Yale-NUS College. He is an active member of Dirt Collective since 2014- and is now collaborating with ruruHaus + Donkey Mill Art Center as part of lumbung: documenta fifteen. www.jamesjack.org