Calling the Earth to Witness: Lessons on Artistic Ecologies, Threshold Crossing, Archival Fragments, Restless Topographies, and Learning Strangeness alongside Non-Human Collaborators

You are cordially invited to a lecture by Zarina Muhammad:

Calling the Earth to Witness: Lessons on Artistic Ecologies, Threshold Crossing, Archival Fragments, Restless Topographies, and Learning Strangeness alongside Non-Human Collaborators

Date: 29^th August 2025

Time: 6:00-8:00 pm

Venue: SDE4, Level 5 Forum, DOA, National University of Singapore, 8 Architecture Dr, Singapore 117564

This talk draws from Breathing in a World of Water // Calling the Earth to Witness, an ongoing transdisciplinary project that traces environmental histories, threshold crossings, and multispecies entanglements across archipelagic Southeast Asia. Grounded in site-sensitive artistic research and collaborative fieldwork, the project engages with urban shorelines, intertidal zones, submerged ruins, and coastal ecologies as living archives of ancestral knowledge, ecological memory, and political contestation.

As artists, designers, and researchers working with landscape, how do we attune ourselves to the undercurrents of place, its silences, disappearances, spectral presences and unrecorded histories? What does it mean to listen to the earth as witness, or to treat land and sea not merely as backdrop or site, but as living collaborator, timekeeper, and teacher? What becomes possible when we approach the earth not as resource, but as witness, when we allow humility to interrupt our habits of knowing and making?

Speaker Bio

Zarina Muhammad is an artist, educator and researcher whose practice is deeply entwined with a critical re-examination of oral histories, ethnographic literature and other historiographic accounts about Southeast Asia. Working at the intersections of installation, moving image, sound, text, participatory practice and performance, Zarina’s practice has been interested in the broader contexts of eco-cultural landscapes, myth-making, haunted historiographies and role of the artist as “cultural ventriloquist”.

She is currently developing Breathing in a World of Water// Calling the Earth to Witness, a long-term, transnational audio-visual-performance research project that explores how water, earth, land, and soil shape histories, cultures, and economies, with focus on Southeast Asian narratives and situated ecologies. She has presented her work widely at international biennales and institutions.

This lecture, moderated by Wai Hon Tham, is a part of BLA4/MLA1 Studio LAD4001/ LA4701 “Fifth Nature”, led by Dr. Victoria Jane Marshall.