What happens when heat gets under our skin and rewires how we think, write, and dream? “Perhaps we need to embrace jungle text, or humid persuasion, or deltaic quandaries, or we could have monsoonal rants. Perhaps we can engage in going troppo.”¹
ʙᴇʏᴏɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇʀᴍᴀʟ ɴᴇᴛᴡᴏʀᴋs at HotHouse presented a double bill screening of two films and a listening session. ʙᴇʏᴏɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇʀᴍᴀʟ ɴᴇᴛᴡᴏʀᴋs excavates our planet’s fevered futures and speculating on what happens when current climate regulation systems face inevitable entropy.
The screening displayed the urge, fantasies and mania of regulating heat in the tropics. It conjured the extent of geo-engineering projects, atmospheric control mechanisms, and the construction of a solar imaginary.
ғᴜᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴛʀᴏᴘɪᴄs (2023) dir. Kent Chan ³ pushes observations of tropical expansion (due to the climate emergency) to extreme ends, arriving upon the fictional scenarios of a future and global tropic. The work speculates upon the ramifications of earth’s warming and consequent loss of climate demarcation. In a mono-climatic world of forever-summers, might a global tropic mean the blurring of geographies, histories and cultures?
ᴛʀᴏᴘɪᴄ ᴛᴇᴍᴘᴇʀ (2024) dir. Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee ⁴ cracks Singapore’s disciplined tropical facade, infiltrating the city-state’s environmental forgetting program through surveillant climatic infrastructures and extreme terraforming. Ghost voices—Nancy the Peranakan nyonya and omniscient J.A.C.E.—survey endangered mangroves while new energy processing islands rise from the ocean. Nymphs feed on petrol-washed coral reefs where botanical prowess collides with technological spectacle, conspiring against the vision of a solarpunk haven.
Q&A hosted by Natalie Khoo
Listening session inspired by humid-haunted-scapes with Safuan Johari
1805 chars
