DoA Symposium: Building / Community in the Tropics and Beyond

15.30–16.00       Film Screening of Animacies of Absence by ila

The image of the knot has emerged as a way to imagine cohesion without a prior assumption of collective solidarity.”
– Elaine Gan & Anna Tsing

Land and nonhuman inhabitants are always resisting and fighting back, repopulating areas that they were removed from. They remain as silent and steadfast guardians, animacies of absences. These old beings, the mother and datok and all the other reverent spirits inhabit these spaces and manifest as interspecies knowledges. Animacies of Absence traces the flow of water inward and along the coast through stories of embodied practices, fractured kinships and impacts of displacement on the spirit and the body. What persists and perseveres in a continuously changing coast and what endures in its absences?

The assemblage presented in this work is an exploration of the languages, concealment and collisions, the frequencies and yearning for a knot to remain in motion, to remain coordinated to other rich nonhuman lives beyond our own. By adapting oral history interviews, newspaper articles and conversations during site visits, the work is woven together with three interviews whose narratives offer alternative pathways to map the coast beyond the geographical.

Collaborators who contributed to this work include Faizal Sani, Irsyad Dawood and Suhaili Safari.