It’s not easy to disentangle the web of culture that weaved through the Southeast Asian region. Here, ways of living and beliefs are continuously displaced by and merged with new ones, escaping the simplicity of Western nation-state boundaries. Lands are fertile yet unstable, inviting natural disasters as well as continuous extraction and political contestation at the expense of the people. Setting off to interrogate the cultural artefacts and memories that stubbornly remain in their fractured present, our filmmakers divest from the colonial ways of establishing authority of knowledge over their subjects. These films propose creative speculations based on correspondences, close reading of archives, mythologies, to oral history and lived narratives.

This program is a curated collection of short films by contemporary Southeast Asian artists, focusing on themes of colonialism, land, and the ethnographic gaze. While the curators initially planned it to address the significant underrepresentation of Southeast Asian art in Dublin’s cultural scene, its purpose has now become critically urgent. In direct response to the devastating natural disasters that have recently struck the Philippines, southern Thailand, central Vietnam, and western Indonesia, this event has been transformed into a fundraising initiative. All donations collected will go directly to vetted relief efforts in these affected regions.