Weather & the Environment

This section looks at resources that negotiate with, and make meaning of Southeast Asia’s weather and environment, including humidity and volcanic terrains surrounding this region in both imaginations and everyday realities.

Southeast Asia has often been associated with the ‘tropical’—associated with heat and high humidity in countries near the equator. This description, according to Beynon, functioned as an often Orientalising western trope, with Southeast Asia as its climate-uncomfortable ‘other’, compared to its own temperate, comfortable climate. Juxtaposed with the histories of western colonialism and rhetoric of western modernism, imaginations of the ‘tropical’ has come to signify unruly jungles, the primitive and the wild, compared to the order, progress and human mastery over the natural world. Constant high heat and humidity also bring about challenges to processes of preservation in the arena of art. Agawal and Baxi had highlighted as early as 1974 how such a climate allows microorganisms and insects to thrive, and at the same time cause works made by wood to grow damp, paper to grow limp, or metals to corrode and rust rapidly. In this sense, ‘tropical’ is not merely a geographic descriptor, but one that carries conceptual, material and experiential weight, as well as a problem to be overcome.

In everyday practices, the solution comes as comfort for both human and art orientating around cooler and less humid environments, bringing proximity between technologies of air conditioning as a maintenance of a temperate climate in both domestic and public spaces.

An entropic outcome of heat and humidity such as rust need not be seen as an unfortunate outcome, but perhaps a potential agent of time and witness of decay, collapses and recoveries, evolution and extinction, or function as a material sign to ruination. Taking cue from Chitra Sankaran’s mention of Japanese aesthetics and wabi-sabi’s focus on beauty of natural aging and aged materials, could rust similarly be seen as both decay and art, sitting more comfortably in its tropical climate?

While the relationship between heat, humidity and the air-conditioner reflect an aspect of human’s control of nature and environment, there are also aspects of such relations beyond human control, but nevertheless garner human/community responses and adaptations to these environments.

One such arena is the Indonesian archipelago, structured around a ‘ring of fire’—an arc of volcanoes that run along Sumatra towards the Philippines. Yet agricultural communities choose to live within close proximities to active volcanoes due to the richness and fertility of its soils from aftermaths of eruptions, and simultaneously avoiding destruction from volcanoes’ eruptions. Volcanoes are not merely seen as harbingers of danger, but are also integral to community identity-making and sense-making in arenas of life that are beyond their control. This is seen where memory of past eruptions are immortalised through myths, rituals and stories passed down through generations of survivors. Sometimes, these pertain to what has to be done to prevent another calamity. In other places such as the Mayon volcano in the Philippines, it was thought to be the resting ground of the dead, as bodies carried up to the slope were believed to be reincarnated in the fires.

In this way, according to Bankoff, Newhall and Schikker, ‘co-volcanic societies’ are created between volcanoes, human communities, their identities and  activities. Such lifeworlds of volcanoes and human communities have also been artistically explored and expressed, for example, with Indonesian curator, Mira Asrinigtyas, and her biennale-styled, site-specific project, 900mdpl. Comprising three iterations, these exhibitions revolve round their stories in and from Kaliurang—an aging historical resort in Yogyakarta, and 7km away from Mount Merapi—and the 2800 inhabitants living there within an immediate vicinity of the active volcano.

Through these examples, we hope to elucidate potentials in considering wider aspects of Southeast Asia’s climates and environments as potential sites of meaning-making.