Rachmi Diyah Larasati (University of Minnesota), “In Reading Machine: Dancing in the Forest”

This talk traces the cartography of time in contemporary spaces  [forest] of Southeast Asia.  Tracing embodied feelings, re-thinking bodily sensibility and  dance as a response to the redistribution of [neo]-colonial perspectives.

I will focus on audio political narratives to engage and re-examine a historiography of violence as the machine of current time. These works not only overlap, re-route, and reproduce the reading of modern time as a colonial machine, but also reflect  post-colonial state violence. They are fragments of “speech” placed in an audio memory, registering a space-time continuum of haunting.

Friction, the exaggeration of extraction and subtraction of life become currency. This talk revisits the experimentation of sound and time, a contested forest and spatial engendering mechanism of machines in the new empire. A spatial regime for the unwanted and un-docile, yet a co-opted aesthetic as the sublime.