Taking off an airplane, we often look out of the window and see that the land area diminishes with the height. Our perception has been raised from a two-dimensional perspective to the perspective of God in just a few minutes. From urban plains to winding rivers, from hills and valleys to magnificent mountains, they gradually become towering islands in the vast ocean. It suddenly became clear that islands are miniature continents, and continents are very, very huge islands. It seems that the land and the sea are connected, but the world is both formed and unconnected. It is this beautiful emptiness that makes us want to explore.
Robert Louis Stevenson is best known as the author of the children’s classic Treasure Island. A map of an imaginary island gave Stevenson the idea for the story. When Stevenson recalled in his Essays in the Art of Writing that he would sometimes “On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully colored; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbors that pleased me like sonnets."
Flaneur in The Insular Cities: Island Ecology is an internet-based residency project. It explores the topic of islands collectivity as artistic experimentation with Island Ecologies as a point of departure.
Using the notion of the island as a foundation, from the ports to the islands, from land to the sea, in a dream state, these seemingly unrelated points break away from the continuity of time and space in this project. The project demystifies reality with the fictional; it explores the spooky state that connects and divides the binaries. It is a journey along the state lines, a journey without borders: surrounded by the ocean on every point on this land is a starting point, every mountain are points of opposition, and yet they connect each other to the borders.
People are breathing on the passage, while fate plays on the flute.
Randomly dispersed on-site on this earth, we explore the different worlds within. At the same time, we use different lenses to look at the converted myth and the people, the culture, the ecological system, as well as every other matter under the same sky, like inside of a peculiar prism. In this network, regardless of geographical and spiritual disintegration, the borders we are situated on are like the room of (non)existence, as we are pandering on our imagination of the island, with every thought in our mind throughout the journey: will the island be aligned with our vision when we actually arrive, how different will it be?
With increasingly strict national boundaries and quarantine conditions imposed on a global scale, we want to explore the possibility of island network and topology, by extension its limitations, boundaries, modes of co-existence, and the zones between such demarcations, hybridization, and vibrations within its locale.
We hope that through this talk, we can create a new platform that makes these connections in contemporary art. We hope to share our experiences and learn from each other and extend the possibility of artistic development. If you are situated within the World Wide Web, feel free to join the discussions with us.
策划团队：细着艺术、Jalan Besar Salon
