#1 Fall 2021 秋刊

陈玺安 Zian Chen

Editor’s Introduction

陈玺安 Zian Chen

“we can make friends with other living things.”

how do we develop a posthumous conscientiousness in which composting becomes the modus operandi of media platforms, refashioning the idea of the new?

Perhaps Arrow Factory in 2008 could be considered the fruit that grew from composting underground art from the 1990s.

I wondered if, rather than commissioning authors to write fresh contributions for this new media platform, we should consider something geared toward “old” media, so that we can explore the possibilities of composting with existing materials.

In his curatorial practice, Akac Orat presents his thoughts on the indigenous ontology of “becoming a real human being.” Compared to an essentialized understanding of indigenous knowledge and identity, this bodily knowledge must be activated in the contemporary moment.

Legal scholar Brenna Bhandar has examined how identities were created for North American indigenous people as a result of land and property rights. These identities were shaped by modern property rights systems, forming what she calls the “identity-property nexus.” Bhandar proposed this idea with the need to “develop a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.”

This non-fiction text shows us that, perhaps when reading the Karrabing Film Collective’s of settler colonialist critique, one can make use of the museums where you live and the memories of one’s ancestors to imagine yourself relative to the Karrabing Film Collective.

Can we simply compare our understanding of indigenous people with China’s conception of ethnic minorities? Or, in the indigenous land of China, can we understand settler colonial critique as a manifestation of post-colonial discourse?