Dokyu:Intersections of History, Creative Writing, and Arts Practice
Dokyu is a series of collaborative workshops and conversations that seeks to reconsider what it means both to document and to work with documents. Since February 2021, Dokyu has gathered historians, curators, creative writers, and arts practitioners in bimonthly online conversations to explore inter- and cross-disciplinary practices surrounding historical documents and the archives. Drawing from varied fields such as documentary poetics, environmental and community-based art and history practices, performance art, and painting, among others, and spanning multiple locations of research including Singapore, the Philippines, Japan, Hong Kong, the U.S., and Switzerland, Dokyu's participants have sought to expand the ways in which we approach, understand, and interact with historical documents. To reflect this international collaboration, the Filipino word dokyu was adopted.
The interviews and works gathered here in print, and the accompanying materials available online at ASAP/J (https://asapjournal.com), clarify how artistic praxis, creative writing, and historical work can operate when they are taken out of their respective comfort zones and into an immersive world of co-creation. Dokyu attempts to compare different disciplinary methodologies regarding the archives and to discover a new language that draws from but also goes beyond the different fields of history, creative writing, and arts practice. Dokyu establishes an experimental space that fosters interdisciplinary dialogue, transforms artistic and scholarly methodology, and informs the ways the interdisciplinary in the humanities is both practiced and taught. To the latter end, Dokyu has [End Page 401] included collaborations with undergraduate and graduate research assistants, whose ongoing contributions have become a core element of the project.
Dokyu commenced from a shared dream of James Jack, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, and Naoko Shimazu in 2020. They brainstormed ideas for collaboration in four stages for nine participants:
1. introduce our work, begin conversations, and launch website (2021)
2. develop collaborative works and share them in bimonthly meetings (2021–2022)
3. share our works in a series of roundtable public talks (2023)
4. publish an edited volume of collaborative writing and artworks (2025)
Then, each of the initiators—James the visual artist, Larry the poet, and Naoko the historian—invited two other people in their disciplines.
Over the last three years, the project has evolved for reasons both organic (shift-ing artistic and scholarly directions) and practical (including funding developments and geographical moves). One original member has paused because of other obligations, and one former undergraduate research assistant has joined the group as a core collaborator. In the summer of 2023, we took the opportunity to reflect on what we have learned and made together so far, and what we hope for the future. The discussion below has been condensed and edited together from several conversations conducted between May and September of 2023 via Zoom, email, and face-to-face among groups and pairs of Dokyu participants. We have also included excerpts from collaborative works, solo works, and one-on-one conversations, some of which appear here in print and others which can be accessed at ASAP/J.
DOKYU MEMBERS, SEPTEMBER 2023
Yi Qian Chan, artist and writer
Martin Dusinberre, historian
James Jack, artist
Hilmi Johandi, artist
Pareys Liu, research assistant
Anthony Medrano, historian
Collier Nogues, writer
Siddharta Perez, curator [End Page 402]
Aki Sasamoto, artist
Naoko Shimazu, historian
Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, writer
FORMER STUDENT ASSOCIATES (YALE-NUS COLLEGE)
Sofie Isabel Paculan Andal (2022–2023)
Yi Qian Chan (2021–2023)
Christie Chiu (2021)
WEBSITE DESIGN
Sean Cham
Dokyu, "Dokyu Collective Meeting #1," February 28, 2021.
What do you value most about Dokyu?
The first thing that comes to mind actually is authenticity. This group is a container that allows all of us to show up where we're at. That's very interesting to me, in thinking about collective work—collecting, collective being—and trying to think about creativity in a different way, especially if we're working together. It doesn't always have to be output-based. Dokyu allows [End Page 403] us to really experiment, and those qualities of experimentation are a bit messy, or like Martin has said before, vulnerable, at the core. It is quite vulnerable to just show up and see where certain relations can go. I think it's very important.
As a caveat, I'm part of a lot of groups, a lot of collective experiences. So this is quite unique for me, that I observe a certain quality of authenticity from each of us. And that's quite important, especially considering the kind of polarizing qualities of fields and industries and academic disciplines that we're all in and seem to be kind of fighting through. I think it's very important to have these spaces to show up coming from our distinct fields, but trying to overcome that polarization. That's what I value most about Dokyu.
I've done a lot of collaborative work and I've covered quite a lot of things. I never do it with people that I'm not sure about. We've got to be friends. Because there's got to be an incredible level of trust first. You've got to be sometimes quite brutally honest to each other. And you've got to be able to admit that "Yeah, okay, this isn't that good. We've got to do something about it." And so, I've come to learn quite a lot about how to do collaborative work.
But the thing I like about Dokyu is that I really feel like a beginner. And I really like that because I'm not senior. This seniority thing for me is always here, always existing in my everyday life as an academic. I'm always conscious that I'm the professor on this team. I ask myself, "Does it mean I've got to be careful about this?" Or, you know, "Do I push this thing more?" It's a bit like being a conductor.
But with Dokyu, I feel like I'm in Grade One. And I just love it. I don't know how to do these things. I'm learning, and I just love that.
Dokyu has become a space for me where I can be, yes, vulnerable in ways that I didn't expect and that I think are good for me, not just intellectually but also emotionally. Dokyu is a safe space for that. So much of my life—I suppose that I'm probably speaking for many of us, as academics, as teachers—is about performance, about making a show for the world. Dokyu takes me out of that zone, and it feels quite raw for the two hours that we're talking. So then the after-effects continue over weeks, often subconsciously. It's offered me a chance to turn in on myself in ways that I've found unexpected and very valuable.
It's made me a better historian! It's not just that it's been a chance for self-reflection or some kind of therapy group (although it is all of those actually!), but I write with a different language now; I certainly think with a different language, even when I'm just doing my day job as a historian. It might take years to find an end-product. But I can feel it already. And that's invaluable.
I'll say something very brief, which is just that I like to listen [End Page 404] and learn. Those two things are what I like most about the group. Dokyu allows me just to listen. And then also learn from different perspectives, different ways of approaching things, of articulating things. Every time we get together, I'm taking mental notes on approaches, framing, vocabularies. I think, somewhat like what Martin was saying about it making him a better historian, every time we get together, it's like osmosis. I just take it in, and it does add value to the way I think about things. I can't always pinpoint what. But I feel like I learned something, ultimately down to the craft level.
I feel quite the same as Anthony—it's about learning. I love experiencing, lending, seeing practices and ways of thinking that are similar but that can also be different. I find it very fascinating when a term is similar, like the idea of construction: constructing something or like constructing a meaning. How one approaches the definition of a term is different, but the outcome, in a way, is still similar. I find that sort of similarity and difference, when they combine, to be quite interesting. When I experience this, sometimes I feel goosebumps, for example, when I [an artist] was working with Naoko [a historian] in our collaborative work. There are certain ways that she will work and I will work, so I find it very engaging and eye-opening.
I don't know if I value this the most. But I feel like Dokyu keeps me in check. Tonight, I'm reminded,
James Jack, Flowering (2021). Rainbow pencil on paper. Drawing created around the timing of Dokyu workshop #6.
[End Page 405] "oh, this is the group I can nerd out with"; this is the group I can talk with about photographs. I'm saying that as someone trying to write poems again in the past two months in a way that I used to write them, if that makes sense, before things like photographs or archives or history ever made an impact on my work. I've been trying to touch base with what I find pleasurable in writing, and I've taken a break from thinking about archives and history. So it's refreshing to be reminded of this space for me where I can think about those things. Dokyu is the space where I can articulate ideas regarding history and the past and memory and what we try to do when we're writing about memory, or at least when I'm trying to write about memory. Dokyu is a kind of filter that changes the tone of those questions a bit—questions that I do ask when I'm writing. When I think about this group, or when I'm in this Zoom room again, as I am tonight, those questions have a different tone to them.
Collaboration, I think, is the other thing that I love. I think it opened me up to collaborate. I continue to collaborate with people. Suddenly it's a part of what I do—it's what I have to show for the past year. I've been working with people, and I can't work with myself anymore. So I blame Dokyu maybe for that! It's become part of how I write.
I want to just jump on to what Larry said: this idea of "now I'm a person who works collaboratively." I'd describe myself that way now too, which is amazing, because two years ago, I was a person who hoarded my little goblin cache of writing. And that's not what I do now, so that's an improvement. But also, a big part of the payoff for me is learning how, say, historians do things. I want to know not only what you think about but how you think about it and what you discover as you're thinking. Same thing with artists. It's a privilege to be in this intimate space of making—as in the way that you all think when you are making. That I should be invited into that space is extraordinary.
Also, one of my favorite things is how our designer Sean Cham and research assistants (first Christie Chiu, then YQ Chan and Sofie Andal, and since August 2023, Pareys Liu) have documented our conversations as they happen, using Miro boards. If one of our aims is to reconsider what it means to engage in the act of documenting, the Miro boards are actually a pretty significant output! They record the patterns of thought, the way conversations move, the connections that aren't necessarily apparent in the moment but that become clear when I revisit a Miro board days or weeks afterward. They're an aid to memory, but also, they are a mode of thinking and even a form of artwork themselves, whose authors are not only recording but also curating and contributing. I love that often there will be doodles and arrows and diagrams and screenshots interspersed with excerpts from conversational threads.
I value Dokyu because I realize that we are all curious humans. The way I got invited is because of James. I was working [End Page 406]
Yi Qian (YQ) Chan and Dokyu, "Dokyu Collaborative Workshop #1, James x Collier," December 6, 2021. Miro Board.
with him as a student associate for the Archipelagic Artist-in-Residence program.1
He asked me if I wanted to join this new group. And I said, "Okay," and he didn't really explain what Dokyu was at the time. When I entered the room, I thought that you would all probably know what you were talking about. But then I got the feeling you didn't! I attended the second meeting in March 2020. But it was refreshing to see that not-knowing, throughout the years. And I've realized that professors are also human. I don't think I made that connection before, because professors were people marking my work. So this is a difference! Because I'm just in this room, with people who are just curious about other people and things and objects. I didn't really see that before as a student.
The not-knowing has been here the whole time! Thanks, YQ, for taking us back to the beginning. We should probably talk a little about how Dokyu started. Larry, James, and Naoko, how did you cook it up?
Basically, the bottom line is I've always wanted to work with creative people. I always wanted to be Larry's friend, and James's. They got together first, and then when they approached me, I was absolutely delighted because I just thought, wow, it's my opportunity to work with, to be included, in this group of creative people.
And then we thought about "What should be our focus?" Well, all of us use historical documents. So how about that? And I thought there might be a really interesting intersection of different genres, of people like artists and poets and historians, all using historical materials. But we use them obviously very differently. And we don't actually know how the others use them. [End Page 407]
Then each of us thought of who could be the two other people we could bring to the group. We had to think of people who would really enjoy doing this kind of challenge. We couldn't have somebody who was going to shut down from being exposed to things that are foreign and different. It's sort of like we are allowed to not know. And to admit we don't know and to play with things and be in the playground together. That was the idea. Let's play together.
One of the early threads that led to Dokyu was a dream I had in 2019, which blossomed into reality in dialogue with Larry over drinks soon thereafter:
"First, Creative Matters," December 15, 2020. Email from James Jack to Lawrence Lacambra Ypil.
A group of artists, poets, and thinkers—not sure why or how we were all brought together—entering a boat. The boat felt large, appeared fancy but from another time period. We could see green beds with gold trim (off limits to us as passengers) before the departure crew sealed them off with curtains. I recalled seeing a seating map before getting on, like in an airplane, but many seats and corridors remained unmappable. After walking around the interior, I settled on a seat that was not perfect, not all that bad, just mediocre. But before the long ride ahead, I had this instinct to get fresh air. Outside, a few friends were sitting/lying on a rock, so I joined them: Hilmi and others. … And all of a sudden, the horn blew and the cruise ship pulled away from the dock, leaving without us. Watching it pull out, my first instinct was to run for it, but it [End Page 408] was futile, as it was far too late. Next, I tried to call friends on board, but no one I was incredibly close with was actually on board the ship. Then the others said, "we weren't meant to be on the ship, so we had better make the most of this island we are on."
And so that you can get a sense of the energy we were interested in cultivating, here is an excerpt from an email I wrote to Larry while we were in conversation with Naoko at the beginning.
If I may add: when I was first approached by James to work on this collaborative project, (as how artists we could approach it), we spoke of confronting or presenting ideas that may be unripe/yet-to-be-developed and uncertainties in a space that can be playful yet vulnerable. Not alone, like in the studio, nor among artists (which perhaps we may be more used to), but also with individuals of different practices, which makes it very interesting.
I had been writing poems about historical photographs for my last book, so I was quite keen to get a stronger sense of how historians write from the archives, but also how visual artists approach material history. The archives, to me, can be a site where writers, artists, and historians meet—even if we usually and conventionally come to the table of the archives in our own sweet time. I thought it would be good to have everyone at the party. As for the name, Dokyu is common shorthand in the Philippines for documentary film, and I think it was important for me to articulate the different ways we might understand Documents—culturally, ideologically, idiosyncratically—that Documents were and are embedded in deeply culturally specific circumstances and histories, and it was necessary for me to signify this multiplicity of meanings and its specificities. Dokyu.space was also a perfectly available domain space for the website. :)
Thus, each of us came to Dokyu's "table of the archives" as practitioners identified by our particular disciplinary affiliations. What did you think about that then, and what do you think about it now?
Part of the reason I was excited about Dokyu was the chance to work with practitioners of fields that approached the visual in very different ways. I was working—and continue to work—with photographs in my writing, and I have continued to explore questions revolving around the use of archival images. Hearing how historians and visual artists think about and approach the visual was and continues to be an interest of mine in Dokyu.
While I may have initially thought that Dokyu was a space where we all might "try on" the methods and modes of another field, right now, I actually feel like it is clearer to me how important it is that I bring to the group my perspectives and insights as a writer. And that it is this perspective and background that will enrich the group. The exposure to different modes has made me appreciate the distinctive idiosyncrasies of my own. To continue to be [End Page 409] in Dokyu, in a weird way, presents the continuing challenge to be myself.
In some ways, I am more aware of being a historian now than before, in the sense that in my collaborations with Larry, he has peppered me with questions like, "Is that how a historian thinks?" "What would a historian say to … ?" "What makes a historian's vision different?" and "If you imagined me as your history student, what would you advise?" I've enjoyed the chance to articulate practices to the group: this is what I do when faced with this document or this question; these are the questions I bring, in turn, to your work (presumably as a historian, although I wasn't previously so conscious of the as a historian part of the interaction!).
By contrast, I've been a bit wary to keep asking our colleagues, As a poet, what do you think? or As an artist, …, partly because I wonder if those disciplinary identifications are so important. Is it more the case that you're defined by your own distinct art or poetry rather than by bringing a disciplinary frame to it? I've found the interactions about specific practices the most stimulating—and I have a few ideas about how we could perhaps build on this, e.g., by all departing from a single point (an object? An image?) and comparing what work we come up with from our common departure.
In the beginning, I felt I knew what historians did. And I was intrigued to find out how creative people used historical documents. I was so naive that I didn't even realize that artists, for example, could use historical documents in their work. So it was virgin territory for me. I had this strange idea that history and historical documents were actually only the domain of historians. We historians knew how to do this. In a way, I was intrigued that other people were using historical documents. I didn't think that other people had just as much right to use them, you see, and I was quite devastated to find out, oh! how much history was used by others in ways, which, for a historian, are almost inconceivable. The way other people get inspiration from historical documents! So that was my journey to destabilizing what I thought I'd known and what I'd thought was my profession. I had thought of myself always as somebody who was very open to things. It surprised me that I had much stronger preconceptions about what I did and about what the proper use of historical documents was. It was quite shocking. Because then you start questioning what you do. And then after all this soul searching, I realized that actually it's very important what I do. Because, you know, we can't all be using historical sources creatively. But still, whatever history is, the way that the historians have been doing it is actually only one way of using historical documents. And also only one way of interpreting history. That was really quite a paradigm-shifting experience for me.
Naoko, it's so funny to hear you say this because I realize as you're talking that I had a preconception, and I think I still do, that you historians definitely know what you're doing [End Page 410] about history. You have a disciplinary guidance, you have a training. I believe in training. I understand that I am trained as a poet and not as a historian. You have an expertise that I like to be near, but I don't remotely have myself. I'm a scavenger when it comes to using historical sources. What I love is researching things, finding little trails—trying to find, for example, the map of Seoul on the back wall of that picture of my grandfather that I brought in for our first collective assignment. I knew the picture was from 1951, and I was delighted to go and try and find that map, and I finally did! I like the little trails that lead around when I'm looking for something like that. But I pursue the larger context only so far as I have the patience or the interest. It's like when you move to a new city, and you're traveling on mass transit, and you become aware of the neighborhoods outside each MTR or subway exit. But a map of the whole city doesn't really come together. I feel like that about the way that I use historical documents, the way that I think about bringing history into my work. This is different than what I imagine training as a historian gives you, which is a different sense of responsibility, a thoroughness, a care in handling.
I suspect loads of historians wish they were proper writers at some level. And just as I have a slightly suppressed desire to be a writer or to be able to draw, Dokyu's writers, artists, and curator seem to have a slightly suppressed desire to be a historian or to understand history. They try and find a language to explain to each other, one that's not a language of explaining in the classroom—which is what we are paid to do—but to try and find some other way of talking, a language that is not educative necessarily but that belongs to a realm which is working in images and working in line-breaks and working in positions of objects to space, and so on. All this forces me to find a slightly new vocabulary for what I do as well, in order to take the interest that you all show in my work or in my practice seriously. And in turn, everyone else who is not a historian in the group has taken seriously my desire to be more interested in what they do.
I don't really see myself always as a historian, unless I'm with a bunch of historians and I just want to fit in and it's social pressure. Generally, I think of myself more as an environmental scholar who does whatever I need to do to explore whatever question I might have or story I want to tell without giving too much salt to "I really need to stay within my lane, and this is my lane and therefore I need to do it this way." I guess I am a bit of a pretender in that sense. I pretend to be a historian, but I've got all this other stuff lurking also in my mind and my method.
I can't see myself as a historian or a writer. But like Martin, what I find interesting about this project is that we come together with different backgrounds, from different disciplinary practices. I find it very amusing to hear and experience how someone else thinks of an idea or approach that I usually associate with my own practice. I find something interesting enough to take away from every session [End Page 411] no matter what area, study, or practice is presented.
For instance, Anthony's area of study is very different and remote from what I'd be invested in, but it's fascinating to hear his inputs in the sharing sessions. How about you, Sidd?
It has been a personal journey for me. It's confronting, for one, to be placed in the group of writers with Larry and Collier. I felt that it could be Larry's approach to get me to write more. Sometimes I hear people talk about my background in writing, and in fact I'm not sure if that's right?
As a curator, I'm constantly looking at different frameworks that people are coming in with. I have a sense that artists deal with approaches more than material or content or domain knowledges. Already there's an embedded understanding that artistic practices have of the dynamics between texts, archival resources, images, documents. … In your work, Hilmi, I feel that those dynamics are already embedded and part of your process. For instance, as a painter, it's natural that you would look at historical or material references to solve problems in images or extend the limitations of images.
Let's take the historians in our group: Anthony, Naoko, and Martin. They're very articulate about how one impact of Dokyu is that the limitations of their discipline are exposed. But Dokyu also extends these limitations by thinking about other sources like image, voice, subjectivity. So I wonder if that's why you, Hilmi, feel that Dokyu doesn't make the same kind of difference to your practice as an artist—because the multi-sourcing and subjectivity exercise is something that you do regardless. You understand what it means to move between materials.
When James asked about my interest in joining the project, I was thinking about how I could use this experience as a platform to think about language that could be textual. That's an area that I lack experience in, like writing. In the beginning, I was not very fluent in the whole act of writing and textual language, but I see a lot of potential with the material I work with that contains text. I got to play around in the text space when we did exercises based on the material and objects we contributed at the beginning. I attempted to engage with that through my drawings. Of course, there is potential and room to expand further. While it stopped there for me, subconsciously I see that I have been dealing with text: as simple as adding text on my paintings. For instance, that painting there [in my studio] has the words "glittering Singapore." I had a previous painting that had "Greetings." I also had a collage work that included "wish you were here." However, I still can't find the right manner to present text in my works. It's still a bit surface-like at the moment, where I superimpose words into my paintings.
Hilmi, you and Martin are talking about "language" in two very different ways: quite concretely about text and the role it can play in images, in your case, whereas Martin is [End Page 412] looking toward a means of communicating across the disciplinary bounds of history and art and writing in a way that is native to none of those fields exactly. But Hilmi, you've also shared some thoughts about that.
I am also interested to understand how writers, poets, and historians think about certain approaches that are relevant to my studio practice, like constructing, deconstructing, and meaning-making. Even if they are just phrases and words I take from the meetings, it's been eye-opening for me. For example, I think it was Larry who talked about walking around in a poem. That hit me. As an image-maker, these visuals are similar to walking around a poem. It may not make sense, but you still see excerpts that are familiar and recognizable which you can associate with.
Yeah, we open up all of these cognitive spaces, like how a painting is a space, how a poem is a space.
Like how a historical text is a space where we can visualize imaginatively how it was and how it's going to be. The pairing with Naoko was fulfilling for me. And to experience everyone's attempts in the workshop was so fascinating. They're like blockbuster hits back-to-back.
I return, though, to the question of how these materials or experiences in the group can be projected to audiences. I don't know how to translate so that people can understand what we've been experiencing. And even though Dokyu can be quite individually driven in terms of how one can benefit, I still feel that some of the ideas and concerns we talk about present many ways of thinking critically. I was also thinking about how Dokyu presents a collaborative work that manifests multidisciplinary practices in a refreshing perspective and manner. Which is why when institutions and schools think of interdisciplinary collaborations to impose in their programs, Dokyu could be a relevant project/document to witness and engage.
Hilmi, now you're articulating a core question for all of us as members of this collaborative, I think—how to explain (in an educative, but not pedantic or performative or "professor-y" way, as Martin might say) "what we've been experiencing" over the course of these several years in each other's company. Maybe we can get at that by asking about the questions Dokyu has raised for our work, either with each other or in other contexts? If you can share examples of these questions and your engagement with them in practice, that would be very useful.
How do I deal with not-knowing? I think this question is quite relevant to me currently as I navigate the world post-undergrad. The not-knowing section in the website page I made for Naoko and Hilmi feels the most impactful to me out of all the webpages I made.2
I have always been the "planner" kind of person, and throughout my experience with [End Page 413] Dokyu, I have increasingly been okay with letting go of needing to know the "end-product" of things and just enjoying the process. Dokyu has been foundational to many of my artistic works. One example would be my capstone project on a capstone project: I played with a capstone project as a medium, not knowing what would come out from it.3 I am also grateful to be able to restage my capstone project presentation with Dokyu members, acknowledging their impact in my work. Dokyu was also influential as I developed an artwork in James's 2021 class Decolonizing Color (below). My late grandfather was a chef at the Istana, the office of the president of the Republic of Singapore. In the artwork, I overlay two images taken in the house I am living in now, one of which includes my grandfather eating a meal. I wrote a letter to him expressing how I felt about his documents and why his documents were not as "valuable" as other documents I had been learning about. And I wondered if he would be happy that I was using his documents without asking, especially since I have never met him.
I have two examples that I can share. The first was talking through some of my documents with Larry as we wrote Ventanilla and his saying that he thought I was telling the wrong story. He didn't suggest what a better story would be, nor really explain why he'd said this; but the provocation has really sharpened my understanding of not just frames and discourses and all the other stuff we learn as history grad students, but really stories, too. I'm trying to bring that sensitivity to my teaching in new ways.
Yi Qian (YQ) Chan, to: my grandfather (2021). Digital photographs, digital pen, and Photoshop.
[End Page 414]
The second was when Collier commented on my book preface and picked up on the metaphor of the "archival eye." I realized then—too late for the book itself!—that there were a whole lot of assumptions I was making about eyes that I needed to think through more carefully. The sensibility that a writer had brought to my material, or more precisely, to my own writing, was exciting and a bit terrifying for me.
It's perhaps not coincidental that both these examples come from writers, and I recognize myself as being much more in tune with writing than I am with, say, visual or performative art. On the other hand, that may also be the disadvantage particularly of Zoom: the artistic space is very difficult to transmit in a two-dimensional screen form, making it more difficult to understand our artist colleagues in context than it is for them to understand, say, a poet's words. I would love to show some of my (textual) documents to Hilmi, James, and Aki and ask what they see in them as visual objects and how they also might "read" some of the visual material I'm dealing with. And, perhaps more importantly than this, to think through what the spaces of this history might be, artistic and curatorial.
Dokyu has cultivated my thinking to work with text, and it's likely been subconscious because of my repetitive encounter with words in our Dokyu sessions. I mean, texts start appearing in my paintings. Like the work with Singapore Art Museum, the Travel through Malaya, where I used the text as an element to signify the subject or context of travel posters. Travel through Malaya is quite bold to include in a visual work that is otherwise quite abstract. I still see text as a form, but the form is restricted by the shape of the text. I did a cut-out of the actual posters to place over a lithograph plate. I still see the potential of these posters because they were quite time-specific: they're from the early 1930s. I came across the original posters at the Heritage Conservation Centre, thanks to Roger Nelson [Assistant Professor, Division of Art History, Nanyang Technological University]. They have plenty of posters spanning the 1920s to '70s. I saw that a certain period has a certain aesthetic quality because of technological advancement and the location where they were produced. When society got a bit more modernized, the aesthetics become more graphic, as opposed to how they were painterly in previous periods.
Collaborative work and methods have been the major concern that Dokyu has raised for me so far. How much of my work can be done with others and in what ways? What other forms of writing can I do that involves working with other people (rather than locking myself up in a room)? But also, where might I find courage to write about things that I would not be brave enough to do on my own? What forms of solidarity, in other words, are to be found in creating with someone else, with someone other than ourselves? And perhaps that's what Dokyu so far has been like—to make something with "someone other than ourselves."
I don't think my practice has changed so much in terms of how I see myself academically. But what has changed, I think, is what [End Page 415] possibilities I see available: so Collier's work and activities generate immersiveness; Larry's use of language and auto-translation [as in his chapbook, You Know I Was Sentimental During the Thought of the House] and Hilmi's practice where he takes things that are iconic but also tweaks them enough to where something else is going on. What do I think the possibilities are for me? I can play with language and format more.
For example, I wrote a paper about these fish from Lake Lanao that are endemic, and then they become extinct. When I gave the presentation at the Learning from Aliens conference, that was my attempt to do something different.4 Normally, I would have a paper. I would have read the paper out. I would have had corresponding images that move chronologically and systematically. I was trying to be a bit more performative with it and also a little more self-reflective or reflexive, bringing myself in a bit more.
I opened that talk with my personal relationship to Lake Lanao and the trips that I made there when I was living in the Philippines and my own experience with the lake. And then how this lake has endured so much, with the political campaigns, and then the war, and then the siege, and then the bombings. And these fish managed. It's a weird way to get to fish in a lake, but these fish have weathered all that. Up until they haven't been able to weather anymore, and it wasn't the bombings that killed them. It was these introduced little gobies, these white fish that were introduced accidentally and came in and wiped them out. I was working without a script, trying to be a bit more storyteller-ish, trying to think about different forms of information.
With this other project on seaweed, and with the Botanic Gardens stuff I've been working on, I'm also thinking about illustration, about the artists talking about their lives. There are a couple of Filipino artists who have done a lot of seaweed watercolor paintings. I'm wanting to think not just with our knowledge of seaweed and how do these seaweeds get their scientific names but also with the kinds of imaginations that seaweeds inspire like watercolor paintings by these artists. I'm wanting this to be a bit more like Dokyu in that sense, thinking without any disciplinary or methodological boundaries and just trying to grab and loop in whatever I can to help me move this story about seaweeds.
This reminds me of Martin's introduction to his book manuscript.5 He anchored the introduction in the parallels between his own story and the story he tells about a different boy, a historical boy. And those stories open up into the story of the ship and where it had been, and then the more conventional historical narrative. He's really going back to storytelling, trying to anchor the book in a context that's beyond the expectations of the genre or the form or the discipline, conventionally.
The Martin example is really useful. What's becoming clear in my mind is that I'm interested in this kind of double, or multiple, [End Page 416] biography, this braiding of biographies. I live in the region where I'm doing the research, and I've got these relationships to places, and to the things within those places, and the people, and my colleagues that are in these different universities. I'm becoming more aware of this double biography: my story, but also how my story is linked or tied to this other story that I'm trying to tell, which is the biography of, say, seaweeds, or a biography of the scientists who studied seaweeds, or the biography of an herbarium and how it came to be. The biography as a way of storytelling is quite fun. It's where I'm at, intellectually.
The "fun" part, the pleasure, is important! Do you remember how in our first meeting Larry said we might get lost, and then that "if all goes well, we WILL get lost"? He also suggested that our conversations might "spiral into creative works." Is "spiraling" what we have done? What other shapes have we made?
James at one point talked about a mangrove route, how it grows, but it never crosses itself. It's constantly wandering and searching and connecting. But never doubling back. I'm not sure how much we double back. I mean, I think we're constantly unfolding.
I don't really see a spiral, I see connections made with more linear lines like triangular formations, where it expands outward. Or triangular spirals moving outward might work too. Perhaps it is because the 3×3×3 description we held onto at the start of Dokyu stuck with me, and triangles have three points. But now that the 3×3×3 description has expanded with the addition of me (yay!), I don't know why but I imagine the casino game where a few dice are being thrown and the thing spins and the dice land on random numbers and we roll with it. … Roulette!
I think in the case of Larry and me, yes, we have spiraled—and are continuing to do so. The obvious "outcome" is Ventanilla: Duet, which we published, and which we also performed live for the first time together a couple of nights ago in Cebu, Philippines, thereby opening up a whole new set of conversations. I'm bemused by Larry describing me as a writer, but I think I can get used to it! But I also found Sidd's practice of the "prep room" incredibly stimulating to think about (and, eventually, think with?); I have an image of Google Maps and poetry from Collier that I find difficult to shake; and I also have various other images or words I associate with particular colleagues in the group. I'd like to explore these more—but I'm also conscious of how little time we all have. …
Naoko, have you spiraled?
Well, no, it's more like I've realized. … You see, I've always been deeply envious of creative people. Being together has made me see some possible tangential things happening, which is really enriching my life. In a way, I dare to think that perhaps I could do something, too. It's daring me to think about the impossible. That has been super exciting. For example, with Hilmi … I felt [End Page 417]
James Jack, with Collier Nogues and Kelab Alami, Rhizophoric Conversations (2022). Pencil and saltwater on paper.
Detail from Rhizophoric Conversations showing excerpts from collaborative conversation between Collier and James.
[End Page 418]
James Jack, Triangulating (2021). Rainbow pencil on paper.
very frustrated when Hilmi and I had a very intense period of getting to know each other, and also when we did our collaborative presentation, the "show and tell," I really wanted to push that collaboration further and bring it to some kind of closure. And then at that point [the group agreed about all of our smaller collaborations], let's just let it sit and explore other things. So I was thinking, "What? All that work I put in, you're telling me to just let it sit?!" I was deeply frustrated for about six months. I felt like I wasted my time, and I thought, "I put so much investment, so much thought, into this and I'm not allowed to finish what I did?" But then as time went on, I began to think in a more constructive way. What was I getting from this collaboration, this collective?
And the answer was reading, abstracted to a very basic level. New ways of thinking about things. I thought, actually, it's been fruitful in a much bigger sense for me than to finish a project. It has made me so much more comfortable with talking to people from different areas about what they do and how they do it, with having conversations with them to understand how they do what they do and why. This is a mega implication for me because it's really about "how do you generate conversations between two entirely different areas?" I began to realize that this project, this collaboration, has been fundamentally important for me to become more confident about not-knowing. And wanting to know. Without even pretending that I know anything. What about you, Collier? [End Page 419]
For me, we keep making the shape of beginning. On the one hand, yes, I want to make things. I want there to be a thing I can point to and say, "I made that, it's a poem, it's finally done." But also, I feel like I have capitulated, happily, to the sense of beginning things, and I think partially this is because I believe that they are going somewhere. The presentations that we've given to each other, and the thoughts I've had in response to them and in our other conversations—they don't feel to me like loose ends that are never going to amount to anything. I have lots of little scraps of things that I've written and never come back to, and occasionally, I revisit those archives and think, "maybe I could go there again." I don't, usually (and I've learned from her conversation [see p. 423] with Hilmi that Sidd doesn't, either!). But I remember what we've done in Dokyu better. It's memorable to me. It stays present. For example, the "show and tell" that you and Hilmi did together. When YQ and I were working together on our Sembawang Naval Base photo-poetry collaboration, she pointed out that something I had suggested reminded her of what you and Hilmi had said. I was like, "Wow, she's totally right, this is recursive, the two of you have entered my brain, my process." It's like you two were theorizing something, and I then absorbed it into my own practice. YQ was able to connect all these dots where I could not, because she's been paying attention this whole time. So I feel influenced, palpably. And it is a joy to sense that influence as a presence that is ongoing.
When we met each other in person for the first time, it was like meeting all my very reliable batteries or something. That's not a very romantic way of describing it, but I just feel like Dokyu is a generator of creative energy; it's a source that I can tap into, which is not something that I've really had before. It feels like a community. If that makes sense. When I think about what my ideal communal values are, I mean, I feel like the energy of that is what I have with Dokyu, which is precious to me.
I entirely agree with you. Sometimes, over the last two years when we had the meetings, I would think, "Oh no, I haven't thought about what we are supposed to do!" I was one of the three organizers, and I would think "I'm a bit tired today, but never mind, I'll do it," and every time afterward, I was like, "wow, that was great." Even if I was exhausted. I thought "wow this is incredible," you know, we're talking and looking at each other on Zoom for two hours, and I would leave feeling joyful!
To close out, I'm curious to know what you all find most challenging about Dokyu? The thing that is hardest?
I'll continue what I said earlier about what I value. I think it's not different. What I find the most challenging is also the most kind of flourishing opportunity, actually. I gave the opportunity first, as Collier prompted—being able to show up and being free to also show off. But I actually get a lot of discomfort being [End Page 420] in the group because I wonder, when we try to find a common language like Martin describes, should we also insist on the languages that we know, coming from our disciplinary practices? As you know, writers, historians, artists. So that's the discomfort. But that's also an opportunity, then, to come into this quality and dynamic of authenticity. Because that's part of it, right? The discomfort is part of getting to that point. I feel that marks the progress of our relationships. This is very interesting for me, because I realized that as we started at COVID, it's like we're growing up. It's the end of an era, we went through this weird transition where we all kind of found each other. And now we're trying to navigate life after a circuit breaker. So I think the discomfort is part of the growing pains. That's what I find challenging. But it's an integral part of what we have.
To add to that, I was thinking along the same lines of the challenge of finding a common language. Because we meet each other halfway, right? We are each stepping into a common zone where we can talk to each other, but I'm also wondering if something gets compromised by that process, even as something's gained. I wonder, am I only getting a 50% Martin or Anthony? Am I getting only a 50% Hilmi? What would it mean to get in your zone? What would it mean to get a real in-your-zone comment? Maybe it's a theoretical group dynamic question, because something's got to give. But there's a part of me that is very curious, and wonders, where will we find spaces to get the pure, denser versions of ourselves? Is there space to bring that out also, without necessarily having to compromise our conversations?
For me, the biggest challenge of Dokyu is actually Zoom. I thought I was already over this Zoom wall, but I still have problems with communicating and being comfortable when talking in front of the screen. I feel very different when talking to a person in person, physically, especially when doing a project, like that pairing with Naoko. The communication between us, the dialogue when we talked, the composition was a lot smoother, it was very easy to talk, and we spoke a lot.
But with Zoom, you probably get maybe 30%, 20% of me. I find this interface quite challenging. But, of course, with Dokyu sessions, I still enjoy the whole process of meeting with this group; it's not as draggy as when, during COVID, people put meetings on Zoom. I would drag myself from group meetings. With Dokyu, it's different. I feel it's still quite personal. But when I'm talking about my own work, I feel a bit awkward. That's the challenge.
I think we might even have talked about that when we saw each other in person, because I feel like I now know the writers in the group better than I know the artists. I think that's because the Zoom medium suits my training, which is partly in being able to bullshit with words when necessary. If you said to me, instead of having a Zoom conversation, [End Page 421] let's draw pictures, I would be way quieter in these conversations, right? I think Zoom creates a disadvantage for those who work with space and need you to just be there to see what they're doing as distinct from those of us who work primarily with words.
And even Sidd's work with the prep room. I'm desperate to see that room, right? It doesn't matter how many times I see a website about it or talk to Sidd in person about it. I haven't seen the damn thing. I can't imagine it. And so that's a bit challenging, as I think Zoom is disadvantageous to a third of the group, at minimum.
And regarding space. I'd be interested here in what Aki says about this, because I'm quite conscious that she and I are the two members living outside of Asia. If we're meeting in Singapore evening time, that's partly to do with time difference with Europe, right? Just on a practical note. I felt quite strongly, when I was traveling in the Philippines and in Singapore these last few months, that Dokyu is a project that belongs here. I have wondered what it would be like to invite all of you to come to Switzerland and work here for a few days, and part of me just wonders whether it would work at all in a European landscape and a nonmaritime landscape. I mean, that's purely supposition. But there's part of me that instinctively feels that although it's a Zoom project, and we're all in different places, Dokyu does feel quite rooted in a Southeast Asian, Northeast Asian, maritime world, and an island world, which is terribly different to what I'm looking at outside my window now.
Yeah, but it's pretty cool that we have found ways to navigate the virtual space as well, like how we approach things, our own work, where just two of us work together to do a presentation for everyone else on Zoom. That has been quite refreshing—how we think about Zoom as a format; how we think about the virtual internet space, the website, to confront our ideas. That phase is probably done or maybe can still be revisited. But now we can see where we can go next.
Martin, I hear a kind of recognition of space and place as we're dealing with the spacelessness of this medium, a recognition of how important it is to acknowledge this basis from which we are Zooming in.
In the span of the past two years, I've Zoomed both from Singapore and from Cebu, and I always feel like I'm a better person when I'm Zooming from Cebu. So that's just how I feel. When I'm in Singapore, I'm working, so the better self is always the nonworking self. But yeah, I think it's interesting that you point out whether Dokyu needs to be a maritime thing or an Asian, Southeast Asian thing. I think that recognizing the spaces from which we're thinking and speaking and writing is important, and it's important to recognize that difference, too. I like that discomfort—the specificity of being in particular spaces and not others. Also, I think we just need to see each other face-to-face more often, to find more opportunities. I feel like it's okay to let Zoom be the mainstay, but I also understand that there will hopefully be future dates [End Page 422] and spaces to aim for. It might be important to keep that in the air and maybe to be more willful about it, knowing that it does make a difference when we're with each other face-to-face.
DOKYU METHODOLOGIES I: STAGING SPACES
SIDDHARTA PEREZ (CURATOR) × HILMI JOHANDI (ARTIST)
Hilmi, you've gone through several painting series that contextualize buildings in Singapore that are either defunct or went through so much infrastructural change and rebranding. Do you feel like you're running out of physical spaces and buildings: these sites that hold remnants of an older Singapore?
I would think so. I was interested in defunct amusement parks where you can find traces of their names and presence like New World, Gay World, and Great World. But after working with them for about four years, it got a bit too predictable for me in terms of my process with them. That's why I started looking out for something else … these themes became too predictable.
How did you get interested originally? What aspects of these kinds of images and archival materials do you find compelling? Did the archives material come first, or did you have personal associations with these places? Do you remember the process?
It was actually quite unexpected. I was initially looking at footage from P. Ramlee [End Page 423] films.1 I was looking for images that could be superimposed into his works. I was interested in his films pre- and post-[Singapore] independence that reflect the conditions of transition of the environment and narratives.
It took a couple of years to come across the amusement parks. I saw the amusement parks as a mechanism to engage with attraction and entertainment. I used them as a way to inform my interests in construction, in image-making, and the construction of meaning. This process then informed my interest in theater. That's why I started looking for forms that would break the illusion of the image through stagecraft.
There's a relationship also with the cinematic space. Without trying to make these spaces [of film, of amusement parks, of the political space of an independent Singapore] distinct or separate from each other—there are concepts of staging here. I wonder how this becomes an interesting challenge in painting when depicting these grounds and layers in spaces: the dimensionality of sites as images. Did you ever return to filmic spaces then?
I've slowly gone back to moving images as references, particularly the video advertisements that promote tourism, and entities such as a country, or hospitality as in hotel experiences. Like this British production reel video in the 1950s promoting Singapore. I wondered how a country, or a space was visualized by another's perspective. What was relevant and desirable enough to be featured?
What were the aspects that you picked up from these documents at that time? Was there footage of the sea, and were there certain stereotypes of people?
I was interested in looking for water bodies, like pools. Sometimes it's the color that I'm drawn to or the interactions in the spaces. That's why I extracted images of pools and beaches. There were also nightclub scenes and shots of country clubs. It's interesting to note mostly Caucasian communities in these spaces, despite it being in Singapore.
I also have this footage from a documentary of a guy walking. I showed this video in one of our Dokyu workshops. The guy walking along the Padang [a playing field and event grounds in downtown Singapore] is the protagonist of a documentary; he was ex-British personnel who eventually became Singaporean. As the lead of this documentary, he was meant to share more about Singapore's culture and traditions. I used that as an action to portray movement, with a background of the former Supreme Court, now the National Gallery, behind the Padang, and all the markers we have now in contemporary Singapore.
Did that translate into a painting?
It was for a videowork. I used it as a footage in my video that compiled different scenes, making up a graphic motion animation. That guy walked into space that I painted.
It's the motion and the animation, then, that render your landscapes, that now have [End Page 424] dimensionality. That's where the spaces in your painting get activated. How about text? What are these notes around your studio?
They are potential ideas. I usually like to record any floating thoughts as I work because it's very easy to forget. It's like the moments before you fall asleep when you suddenly get so many ideas. Or when you're in the bathroom. The brain works when you're not working or specifically thinking about something. So when I'm working on something and thoughts that are not related to what I doing sprout out, I quickly write them down. They come as a set anyway, and that informs my thinking.
So you understand that you have to capture these thoughts. Even if they don't make sense to someone else, these notes activate the connections to other ideas and images. Train of thought. It took me a long time to cultivate that act of writing these fleeting ideas down in my own practice.
Yeah. Sometimes, you feel confident that you will remember. But the next day when you search for it, you end up forgetting.
I am also interested in playing with this relationship to ideas, and answers to prayers that I've said a long time ago, because they would come to me in these strange moments. I'm trying to experiment with the idea that if it doesn't retain, or if I don't remember it again, then it means it's not important.
I'm trying to see my relationship with ideas that do compel me to write down. There are times I kicked myself losing those thoughts.
Hilmi Johandi, "Studio, 26 August 2023," (2023). Digital photograph.
[End Page 425]
Hilmi Johandi, "Studio, 12 September 2023" (2023). Digital photograph.
Because there's something about us needing to write things down, documenting our thoughts that keeps the posterity, right? I like writing down notes, but most of the time I don't return to them at all. So I don't know if the process of documenting yourself does something to you—perhaps giving you clarity, giving you discernment about what thoughts to keep. Maybe there are processes where I feel like I'm purging it, and then there are things that I must write for posterity. That goes through several filters.
With the larger collective, we have kept talking about what Dokyu could do for our individual practice and how are we to transcend the limitations of our discipline? Originally, Larry invited me as a writer. Maybe what Dokyu exposed for me is my judgment that the writing space is a very solitary, individual space, and hence, it is limited. That's why I couldn't fit myself there. I don't think my expressions ever really landed sufficiently in a writer's space. What was revealed was the position I've always taken as a curator—that of deference. Meaning, it's all about looking at what everybody is saying in order to make the connections so that it could be translated or transformed into an exhibition or project. In a way, my subjectivity is not there. That's maybe what Dokyu did for me: it made me ask, "if I were to inhabit the writer's position, would that demand the cultivation of my voice and hence my subjectivity?"
I see, does that become clearer for you? [End Page 426]
It's difficult for me because it has meant I've never taken on that space, because I was never really interested in developing a voice, a style, or a narrative method in exhibition-making.
Do you mean that exhibition-making is objective?
I wouldn't say it's being objective but, rather, being inclusive at the cost of my personal position. That's why Dokyu feels confronting to me, because where do I position myself if I'm there to read everyone else?
Yeah, that can be quite challenging. I find your position quite interesting because there are two roles you take: as a curator and as a writer. That's something I wanted to ask: how do you see, and how do feel, yourself as a curator and a writer?
It's me trying to reconcile that there may be one role, that they're not distinct. But I also like occupying different personalities in myself, because I feel like I have different writing voices depending on my kind of commission work. But I have never really written for myself.
And documents! I've been so careful around archives. I don't want to use someone's archives to memorialize them. I feel that's too patrimonial. I don't like the routes some people unconsciously take, because that's a comfortable position, to talk about a person's biography and put them on a pedestal. It's hard for me to find other approaches to archives because I wonder if I'm also allowed to interact with my own judgments.
I make exhibitions. I don't know if this is obvious to people, but I make exhibitions that never really have a certain position. By putting all the positions and judgments in the same space, it would be other's people's responsibility to come to their judgments. It's my responsibility to put many voices there, but it will be irresponsible for me to put my position there.
So, you do not take an authoritative position in making narratives of works in an exhibition?
That's why I'm not a fan of extended captions. But their absence means you have to ask, how, otherwise, do you move the context of artists and artworks along?
Do you manage the narrative flow with visuals?
When it is possible, I'd like to put everything in. I'm a maximalist in that sense, whether that shows up as putting in a big number of objects or as really displaying a lot of sources. That's why we have a lot of texts and programming in the NUS Museum.
To open up as much interpretation as possible.
People can get lost there when the space of encounter is so open. Like a desert, if you have [End Page 427]
Siddharta Perez, "AFTER BALLADS Prep-room with Fyerool Darma, 2017 NUS Museum" (2017). Digital photograph.
no orientation or compass to read the sky, you'd end up going around in circles for days.
Do you put any limits to that openness? For example, if I were to compose a picture, should I be a maximalist, there would be so many things in the plan that I can look at, ponder, and come back to. Because I see different things as I go about, gaining different experiences with different moments of looking. Does it need limits?
Space is the limitation. I work with very physical boundaries of space. Walls are important.
Do you categorize?
More like groupings of objects and texts.
It's like putting them in different rooms, even though you don't know what room you end up in. Am I in the kitchen or the receiving area? It's the tangible spaces and materiality that keep me from flying in circles.
Do you approach it the same way when it comes to writing?
It may be similar. I remember our friend Roger Nelson bringing this up in one of the presentations I gave: that I was such a curator, using three points to perform my lecture. Because with two points it's too binary, moving between a duality of opposition. But three is a good balance.
When writing, I have three sources. Sometimes these sources are film, a short story (fiction), and a personal story. I don't think I do a good job at connecting them, but I like to see [End Page 428] what happens when they're put in the same space. How would they start talking to one another?
Two has a limitation to it. Where we get inclined to compare. Yes, three is a good number.
DOKYU METHODOLOGIES II: VENTANILLA: DUET
LAWRENCE LACAMBRA YPIL (POET) × MARTIN DUSINBERRE (HISTORIAN)
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this book excerpt contains references to the names and work of deceased First Nation persons.
| ii/2 | |
| I completely dread first sentences, so now that I can very quickly get it out of the way, I should be good. I've been thinking about the ventanillas from our last conversation, how they resonate for our back and forth: sharing our work, comparing documents, talking about family, across different time zones, from different rooms. I imagine what it must have been like for my aunts, telling each other stories at night, with the lights out, and the house dark, and just their voices moving into and out of the rooms, moving past those wooden curlicues near the ceilings over the walls, the wind circulating to cool things down if it was in the middle of summer, or right before a downpour. My father was the youngest of twelve, which meant that depending on the year, there would at least have been two healthy handfuls of siblings trying to get a good night's rest across three rooms. My aunts in the girls' room would have been lying on their banigs underneath the mosquiteros trying to sleep in the meantime talking about which student was noisy, which one was kind, which neighbor did not return the ladle from last week. It was hard sometimes to tell whose voice was whose and if you pretended to sleep, you might catch a story that wasn't meant for you. Ventanillas, by the way, is most probably incorrect, because ventanillas are technically the grills to be found underneath windows facing the street. What I had in mind were those that were put between the ceilings of a house and its walls. I did "research" and asked a friend if she knew what I was talking about, and she suggested that they might be called transoms, which I automatically doubted not because I didn't know what transoms were but because it didn't sound like a word I would ever use in a poem, much less use to suggest that wonderfully illicit transaction we make at night, spilling our stories to the dark without knowing whether a sister was still listening or had already snored herself to sleep. |
A document is a voice as if spoken from another room. In the one which speaks to me these nights, An Aboriginal boy named George reports … I doubt his name was George. That may have been what he told the Cooktown policeman. But "George" also talks of four Blackfellows named Tommy, Johnnie, Charlie, & Township. I don't believe their mothers named them so, that aunts or sisters whispered "Township" to soothe a crying baby on a hot night. George says he was on a cutter called Miranda. His words come at us in the dark. His story will spill across rooms—interrogation rooms, post rooms, meeting rooms, archival reading rooms—to the family dining room, whence I am reading this document out loud to you today. And it will leave traces in places which cannot be roomed—though not for the want of European trying. |
| iii/3 | |
| When I think of History, I think of my father's house in Danao. Built in the 1930s, four towns away from the city I grew up, this house was where we went for Good Friday, All Soul's Day, Christmas. We were the "city kids," my brother and I, the "sons of the doctor," the ones who visited now and then, my brother more often than I through the years, although when we were growing up in the '80s, I would join my dad when he held clinic in Danao, driving his white Toyota Corona, playing his tape recording of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. When the tape was done and we had passed the house with the hornbill in front, we knew we were almost there. My brother pointed it out to me once, this hornbill in a cage in a veranda on the border of Liloan and Compostela. And ever since he pointed it out, I saw it now all the time. Until one day it was gone and there was just an empty cage. And then soon there was no cage. And then eventually there was no house—or at least it was no longer visible from the road, having been covered by foliage, or a billboard. In this way did you know that things were no longer what they were, or that people had moved away, or they were dead. |
I am also interested in a different George: Georg Pfalzer, fresh out of training at the Neuendettelsau Mission college near Nuremberg. Georg composes long letters through the heat of summer to his erstwhile teachers in Germany. Here he is on 11 November 1886, reporting from just north of Cooktown. He writes that the land is being reclaimed (urbar gemacht), the trees, grass, roots, and weeds uprooted (ausgerodet), grubbed up (ausgejätet), the ground dug (umgegraben). To Georg, he is disposing of generic foliage, devoid of meaning or cultural history. Potatoes, coconuts, melons, sweet potatoes, pineapples, and bananas will be planted in their place and fail for reasons the missionaries cannot fathom. I have read somewhere that "to instill the idea of a fixed home is the first task of a missionary". You fix by unfixing what's come before: trees, weeds, people, ancestral land. And one consequence, a few years later, is that an Aboriginal boy allegedly named George will come to the police station to report that as he, Yamasaki, and two others slept on the Miranda, he heard noise from Tommy, Johnnie, Charlie, & Township approaching the cutter. Blackfellow ask for kai kai. Yamasaki gave them half bag of flour. They ask for more Yamasaki say "no got him more I go Cooktown and get more["] Then Tommy hit Yamasaki along Tomahawk the other three kill him too. |
| v/5 | |
| When I try to talk about the D——s and the paltiks, two things Danao is most known for, I know I might be making too tight a braid. Between Danao's most powerful political family and the underground industry of fake guns that my brother once did a research paper on. To know that one could buy a fake "baby armalite" made by someone who was the neighbor of the husband of a cousin twice removed. To know that power was only as good as your proximity to the family that owned the sugar mill, the cement factory, and the beach. That there is a story told about how in '60s they approached my grandmother to ask if they could buy her family's property at the cheapest price and her knowing that she would never in her lifetime see that piece of land again. In my father's story, my grandmother cries all night. My uncle omits the crying. The first rule of modern fiction is that a gun placed on a table at the start of a story must be fired at the end. Why bother writing poetry when this is an argument that history easily makes? |
See, that's what you say, Larry, but I'm unconvinced. In one of your poems you write about a time Before the invention of the telephone. Before the construction of the tram * that would take the flowers down from that mossy mountain top to that sweltering town. That asterisk breathes, it walls and opens, an idea lingering between two rooms. You call the poem, "Standstill, Stasis." Historians talk about change across time. But don't we get closer to the story when the argument momentarily stops? |
REFERENCES
Queensland State Archives (Brisbane); Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche in Bayern (Nuremberg); Noel Loos, "Concern and Contempt: Church and Missionary Attitudes Towards Aborigines in North Queensland in the Nineteenth Century," in Tony Swain and Deborah Bird Rose, eds., Aboriginal Australians and Christian Missions: Ethnographic and Historical Studies (1988), p. 107; Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, "Standstill, Stasis," in The Experiment of the Tropics (2019), p. 56.
DOKYU METHODOLOGIES III: STORYTELLING AND MAKING A MESS
ANTHONY MEDRANO (HISTORIAN) × COLLIER NOGUES (POET)
Anthony, you mentioned in the collective interview that you "pretend to be a historian." This is curious, because in my conversation with Naoko, she was [End Page 432] originally coming at Dokyu with a very specific disciplinary identity as capital-H Historian, which is quite different from what you're talking about. You said that you're interested not only in certain kinds of questions but also in the stories that we can tell. That reminds me of the architecture, the language, you used to describe the Learning from Aliens Conference that you and Naoko organized last May, where James and I both presented.1 You really emphasized thinking about stories.
Yeah, storytelling, and thinking about new ways of telling stories through the lives and afterlives of species, or through ecological encounters. I'm thinking about new forms or styles of storytelling that combine—or complicate—fields and disciplines. That conference about "learning from aliens" brought together lots of kinds of people with a variety of perspectives, trainings, and approaches. For me, the conference was about observing and listening to different types of storytelling that were centered on non-native species.
When I hear people tell stories, I'm always listening for the style—of course the content of the story itself too, but what really draws me in is the presentation, what's their craft like. I'm trying to see if there's something I can learn from this or adopt and embrace. In my own disciplinary identity, I blur lots of boundaries. And so why not methodologically too? That conference was emblematic of how I approach things and the different types of people that
Anthony Medrano, A Red-winged Starling Tells a Story (2023). Digital photograph.
[End Page 433] I'm always thinking about, conversing with, in this web. In a way, it's a scaling-up of our Dokyu group. You know, when we think about whether it's a document or a method that catches us or piques our interest. Or storytelling.
Do you feel it's storytelling that's at the heart of Dokyu? I'm interested in this idea: if we try and describe what it is that we do, are we doing history? Are we doing art? Are we doing writing? Are we curating? Do you feel like storytelling is the unifying quality?
From my read of it, I see storytelling—in the most diverse sense of the word or action or practice—as the thing that connects us all, whether it's curating a space or an experience, which might be what Sidd does, or telling a story through a work of art that might be mixed media, which I think Hilmi does. You yourself do it through poetry and language. Ultimately, I see our collective as a community constituted by different ways of storytelling.
Because the "document" part … I feel like maybe some of us—or maybe all of us—are open to possibilities. I'm wide open to what a "document" is or could be. And therefore, it could be used and treated as evidence in one way or another. It could be the story or part of a story. I don't feel like I needed to be convinced that art could also be a document, or a memory could be a document. "Documents" and the idea of "documenting" may have brought us together, but what seemed to really surface for me was this idea of storytelling and how we approach that through our own practice. What was helpful for me was just seeing how other folks use "documents" as evidence, to put together a story, with or without an argument.
I like how you put it, that you're thinking about the varieties of storytelling that we do. Like if what Sidd does is curate an experience, that's a way of storytelling. I resonate with that as a poet who's working with immersive environments. I always want to connect things, make a network, make a web. I include links that connect my archival resources, so that you can move across my work, out of it and back, and pull together connections.
I hadn't thought about that practice before as being a kind of a curatorial work. But when Sidd was presenting on the "Prep Room" as a curatorial practice—I am intoxicated by the idea of getting to do a prep room with other people, generating materials and ideas in a physical space dedicated for that purpose, and open to what emerges. I guess I could extrapolate and say that's kind of how Dokyu feels generally—like it's a prep room. We're incubating things and then doing stuff outside of the group. I hadn't thought of my own work as possibly facilitating a space like that, but just now when you said about Sidd, I thought, "oh, curating an experience. Yes, that's what I want to be doing." And poets, we do tell stories, but it's not in the same way as fictional narrative works. We're interested in the texture, the material, of language. I like the idea of describing poetry as an experience that needs to be expressed by language and also, in my case, by image. [End Page 434]
Collier Nogues, "Across the Sea (Cape Henoko)." Screenshot of immersive VR poem published in Rabbit: Journal of Nonfiction Poetry 38 (November 2023).
But also what you're saying about how we all use documents makes me think about that assignment that Larry and Naoko and James gave us early on, in which we each had to come up with a statement of "Document is X," the collection of which now makes up the Dokyu website's splash page.2 I don't know about you, but mine was a whole paragraph at first, and then Larry was like, "No, no, by tomorrow it needs to be five words." And I was like, "what?!"
Do you remember which one yours was? I'm not totally sure now which one was mine!
I think I said it was an archive. A document is an archive. I was thinking in terms of how a document holds, or keeps, or houses, a bunch of different kinds of stories. And that repository nature, in my mind, is what an archive is. I mean, all documents, whether it's a painting or someone's diary.
So it's not just part of an archive that's in the Collection of Such and Such or is findable online somewhere. It is something which is, in itself, possibly an uncataloged, uncatalogable archive.
I think it could be both. It could be part, but it also could be a whole. There's a writer, Lara Putnam, who looks at the Caribbean and talks about fragments and wholes. Where she's coming from is this idea that a certain kind of history—in her case an Afro-Caribbean history of laborers—doesn't have a well of [End Page 435] documentation, so you have to draw from fragments. And the fragments, when you weave them together, you can create a whole. Methodologically thinking, Putnam points out that is difficult to tell a story or history of a person or community that doesn't have a lot of paper wrapped around them. Weaving fragments into wholes is one way of doing it.
Thinking of that as a methodological question reminds me of what M. NourbeSe Philip says about telling a similar kind of "paperless" story. She has a work of erasure poetry called Zong! that erases a famous eighteenth-century court case. The captain of a ship carrying enslaved people decided to murder a large percentage of them, because if they died that way, it would cost the ship's owner less than if the captain admitted they'd died of thirst due to his navigational errors extending the voyage so long that they ran out of water. There's only one extant document, the court case, which is around two pages of text. Philip took that as a word bank and extricated voices and lives and names. She writes, "There is no telling this story; the story must be told"; and then says that to write the poems is "to not tell" it.3 The story has to be conjured from the most fundamental parts of language, single words and even letters themselves, rearranged. She performs it with musical accompaniment, and collectively with audiences, too.
Wow. This gets me thinking about Hilmi's approach, taking old iconic postcards or snippets and then trying to activate or animate or excavate a story that's both visible but not so visible, that's there but that's not totally there. And the way you're describing Philip's work, it seems to draw on all three "fields" or "disciplines" we began with. It brings them together: writing, art, history.
It does. And this reminds me of Aki's approach, too, as a performance artist. I remember her early response to "what is a document"—for her, it's a failure. It really made an impression on me when she basically said, "a video documentation of a performance art piece is nothing, is entirely missing the point." And then later, when she presented on her snail installation, she said, "Documentation never catches up with real life. It has no way to compete with real life." I mean, you have to have the documentation of the performance for grant applications or to get a job. But otherwise, it has nothing to do with the performance itself, with "real life."
I visited her grad class last year at Yale called Duration, Audience, Documentation. Their questions about the element of "duration" really got things moving for me. Because these stories we're talking about are also centuries long, right? I don't think any of us works with material that's not trying to go way, way back. Or trying to tell a story over a long period and into the future. For example, the Learning from Aliens conference—we were very future-oriented. "What can we do?" was an important question. How do we tell stories in order to have effects?
Yeah. And getting more people to think about the power of storytelling. The form or format is open. It can be a performance or art [End Page 436] or a curated space. It can happen in lots of different ways. For me, I find that a good story not only shares and communicates, but it also moves people and gets people to think differently. In my case, differently about nature and people and everything in between. That's in a similar spirit to where Aki's coming from—a good document is not a document, in a way. It's something that evades documentation. It evades capture, evades that sense of imprisonment or boundedness. It constantly moves and is left creatively free.
Yes! Last September, I started thinking about that when I did my first conference presentation about Dokyu, back when we were still calling the group Document. We'd started talking about what it is we're doing when we present to each other in pairs or threes: is it a performance, more than a presentation? When Hilmi and Naoko did that parallel streams presentation, where Hilmi's images were unfolding onscreen and Naoko's voiceover was, on the surface, unrelated, I felt so aware of myself as a viewer having to figure out what to do.4 It was not a given, what my participation was. My expectations were confounded in a way that was disorienting at first, but then also lovely. And then Martin and Larry absolutely performed when they presented Ventanilla: Duet. Remember, they made us close our eyes?! They were like, "We're going to read to you now in the dark. Close your eyes." Which is a totally performative element in a way that invites a different kind of vulnerability from the audience than Hilmi's and Naoko's did. I got the sense in our collective discussions with each other across those performances that we were all coming around to Aki's point that documentation of such an experience couldn't help but fail, and that such a failure wasn't benign, really—that a desire to document was, in fact, an inappropriate response, an act of willful failing.
And this makes me think about the "ongoingness" quality of Dokyu's process, more generally—the resistance to documentation of what we're doing together has to do with a resistance to completion, too. We are more interested in how it feels to think together than we are in producing outputs. To that end, being in Hilmi's studio blew my mind. I just loved it and I thought, "everything in here is for looking at, then making a thought, and then making a thing." But so many things in process at once! It was glorious. As a writer, what have I got? I have my apartment and my office; and I do care about how my working spaces are arranged, they're comfortable for me. But I don't have a billboard of beautiful things everywhere. Now I'm kind of like, "I want a room!" What if I had a room in which I could stand up and make a mark on the wall, like when YQ and James and I went to Hilmi's studio? There were a couple of those towels, you know, the "Good Morning" towels in a plastic wrapper on a stool, and James and Hilmi just started tacking them to the wall. In my mind, I was thinking, "James, it's not your studio!" but Hilmi was into it and was helping him do it. So I thought, "I guess this is all fine, then?" Is this how artists are with each other? You know, they can just make marks on things. Whereas it would never occur to me to pick something up off somebody's stool and [End Page 437] stick it to the wall. This is a different way of thinking, of interacting materially with your environment, with the things that are around you. In my workspace, I sit on the chairs, or I put my hand on a pen or I drink out of a cup, but I don't change the things.
I sort of felt the same way in James's studio. I've not been to Hilmi's, but to James's. I had the feeling of "this is a total workshop," like a workshop where you've got material, things pinned on the walls. There was a piece he was working on, when he was thinking about mangroves and entanglements and fish nets, and it was spread over one whole wall. This was his thought process, and it did feel like a kinetic space. There was a real physicality and materiality to it.
Which is quite like the way you were describing Hilmi's studio. I think I'd love to have that, but I often need just, you know, an iced tea nearby, and my Spotify, and I'm pretty much good. I have very low expectations for things to get going, but I could see how it would be if you could walk around in this space. You could sit, you could have tea, you could reflect, you could look, you could, like you said, get up and pin or write. James had all kinds of gallery and show catalogs of his work, but also of other works. It felt like wow, this is a creative space, a library of creativity. It really inspires creativity and action and doing. When I ponder about my own practice, I could have a million ideas go through my head, but I'm not writing them all down or Post-it-noting them on a wall. That would
Collier Nogues, "Poet Workspace, a.k.a. Cluttered Desk," October 13, 2023. Digital photograph.
[End Page 438]
Anthony Medrano, "Historian Workspace, a.k.a. Campus Café," October 11, 2023. Digital photograph.
be great if I could, but I have to just hope that I remember a few of them and then work them out in a document, or a series of documents.
Ha! Sidd and Hilmi talk about that in their sidebar conversation! But yeah, that art studio space is like an externalization of your brain. I would love to have that, but at the same time, it is a very different way of thinking. I mean, I write my notes, or I have ways of gathering notes, but they are not material, not physical, in all these different media around me. I like that it feels like things are in process in those studio spaces. That's what I find really appealing. Because when I'm writing, when I get up, nobody would ever know that something had happened. It's very interior.
I also got the feeling from the images that James has shared that his space is very much about process, and about works-in-progress, but it's also so organized. For as much creative energy that's happening—different things are happening probably on different walls—it's still amazingly structured, amazingly organized. I don't think I'm at all that organized. I wouldn't be able to see the tree. I'd keep seeing the forest. I'm kind of all over the place all the time, and it's only when I sit and start writing that I'm able to zoom in, zoom down.
This is the beauty of Hilmi's and James's work. It has these layers of order and organization. There's this deep order to it and different stages at play here. Once you can develop that [End Page 439] grammar, then you can see the order to it all. Their works are amazing on so many levels.
And I'm sure that they both know where everything is. Right? Because it's mapped, cognitively. It's not a mess. It's messy, but it's not a mess. Thinking is messy. Writing is messy. Trying to make an argument, an academic argument is messy, especially early on.
But a visual art studio, like Hilmi's or James's, is a three-dimensional space that contains a kind of organized, well, not chaos. This is the point. It's an organized process of thinking, it's something in solution, at work and being made. Whereas for a writer, the same thing is contained within a Word document. Ha, "document"! So what does a document do? Is a studio a document, or is it a place that is full of documents? We are returning to the "parts versus the whole" idea you brought up, especially when you say you wouldn't be able to see the tree for the forest.
If an art project is like a tree, I think that if I were in a space like their studios, I'd see all these trees or possible trees and I wouldn't be able to really channel the kind of refined focus needed to actualize a concept or an idea. That's what they do. I don't have that skill set, to be able to go from something big down to this focused piece. Over here is the idea, and over here is the actualized form. It's an art but also a science to be able to do that, to bring it together. I suspect that many people who aren't trained in that way would struggle to bring an idea to that clear point where you produce a piece of work—a tree as it were, and a tree story.
Where we've made a thing instead of "we're continually making things!"
Exactly. Made a thing that has a conceptual statement, which is what they're able to do.
And again, the question of completion. It seems to me that there's something about a visual art studio space. There are moments of completion, moments when a thing has been made. But there's also a looseness. That thing could have been something else. And there could be more things. There's a relaxed feeling about that, a feeling of possibility and of the eternal possibility of generation. I rarely feel that possibility when I'm working on an academic argument or writing poetry. I like to imagine there could be an infinite number of poems about, say, my grandfather's photograph, but there are not. I think there are probably five, and I've already written three of them. When I think about artworks in studios, it's a shaggier kind of completion. Perhaps this has to do with how when I was in Hilmi's studio, there were a bunch of things that he'd already done, and they were still there. They had been shown somewhere, and now here they were, back in his studio. As material for other things that were coming. I think James works this way too. He's got stuff that he's done, that is fodder for next steps. It works a little differently with poetry and with academic work for me. [End Page 440]
Do you feel like you recycle or you return in this way?
Maybe not quite recycle, but I do struggle internally with concluding something. I need to have at least some sort of closure. There needs to be closure to a story at least in the way that I write. That's sometimes tricky. If you're talking about some kind of food, say a fish, where does it end? It doesn't; you have to arbitrarily call it quits. But it has to also feel like this is a natural ending. So it's a bit of magic as well. But what I do is I recirculate things. I like to anchor the things that I think about in the lives of various individuals, in their biographies. In doing that, I'm exploring all bits of their life in relation to, say, a fish or a plant. But there are aspects to the life that I'm not able to bring into the story. So I tend to bring them back in a different form. Maybe there's a different thread to their life, or a different source.
I might use a couple of sources. For example, I'm thinking about seaweed right now. There's this herbarium, this big collection of seaweeds in the Philippines. It's got one of the largest collections of Philippine seaweeds in the world. It was created by this phycologist, a seaweed expert named Gregorio T. Velasquez. Looking at his work and his research and his notes and the specimens that he collected, I can imagine writing about him and really leaning into his material. But only using a fraction of it, when there's still a whole lot more there. It's partial. I might bring back aspects of the material that I haven't yet explored.
For instance, some seaweeds were named after really interesting people. And then the name gets displaced because it's rendered a synonym to something older. So Marcos—Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator—one of the seaweeds is named after him. That's interesting on its own, because there are very few things that are named after him, so there's a whole story there. What is the seaweed? How important was it and where did it come from? Who described it? Who collected it? It comes from Marcos's home region, the Ilocos region. There's a whole political context to the naming of the plant. And it was only two years ago that the plant "loses" its name because based on some recent analysis by a Filipino phycologist who teaches at the University of the Philippines-Diliman, they figured out that it's actually the same plant as one described in the 1960s (ten years before the Marcos named plant). But there were already political currents saying, hey, this shouldn't be named after this guy. And then when his son became president, certain publics were like, "we should definitely change this name." So it was the conventions of taxonomy on their own, not the political currents, but taxonomy on its own that prompted the name change. There's an earlier name of the seaweed, and we have to go with that name.
All of this is to say, you know, I can talk about Velasquez and the herbarium and the importance of seaweeds. And this story might not show up, and then I go back to get this story out. [End Page 441]
These documents, perhaps for James and Hilmi, and perhaps for you, too, with the photographs, these documents are like wells of water, and we can keep going back to the same well. And each time we pull something up, it might in fact be a different kind of story. A different angle. We've changed. Times have changed. Our thinking has changed.
And there are particularly compelling wells we go back to over and over again. Those are the wells I feel I have come to know for each of us through Dokyu, which is one of my favorite parts about it.
collier nogues is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She writes at the intersection of digital and documentary poetics, with an emphasis on making connections across decolonization and demilitarization movements in the U.S. and in the Pacific. Her poetry collections include the hybrid print/interactive volume The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground (Drunken Boat, 2015) and On the Other Side, Blue (Four Way, 2011). Her creative and scholarly work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, and her writing has appeared in Jacket2, The Volta, At Length, Pleiades, jubilat, Tupelo Quarterly, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day Project, and elsewhere.
Notes
1. Yale-NUS College Artist-in-Residence Program: https://www.yale-nus.edu.sg/arts-and-humanities/overview/artists-in-residence/
2. Hilmi Johandi and Naoko Shimazu, "Workshop 2," Dokyu, https://dokyu.space/Workshop-2.
3. "A Capstone Project," https://capstonecapstone.wordpress.com.
4. Learning from Aliens: New Directions in Environmental Humanities Research and Practice conference, National University of Singapore, May 4–5, 2023, https://ari.nus.edu.sg/events/environmental-humanities.
5. Martin Dusinberre, Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and its Global Histories, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Notes
1. P. Ramlee (1929–1973) was a Singaporebased Malayan actor, filmmaker, composer, and musician who is widely recognized as an icon of midcentury Malay-language entertainment.
Footnotes
VENTANILLA:DUET is the product of a months-long collaboration between writer Lawrence Lacambra Ypil and historian Martin Dusinberre. Part exploration of the archive, part correspondence between poet and historian, this book is both a rumination on what it means to be engaged with our difficult past and a celebration of the kind of company conversation makes across space and time as we tell the stories of the world to each other and to ourselves. Notated and designed by Melbournebased Regine Abos, it is a celebration of multilocationed, cross-disciplinary dialogue.
Notes
1. Learning from Aliens: New Directions in Environmental Humanities Research and Practice conference, National University of Singapore, May 4–5, 2023, https://ari.nus.edu.sg/events/environmental-humanities.
2. See Dokyu, https://dokyu.space.
3. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 189.
4. Hilmi Johandi and Naoko Shimazu, "Workshop 2," Dokyu, https://dokyu.space/Workshop-2.
