Priyageetha Dia
_LAMENT H.E.A.T_
_LAMENT H.E.A.T_ is a video that opens with the rhythmic sounds of percussion or at times powerful folkloric vocals. They accompany moving images that interchange between scenes of burning rubber trees in an eerily bloody-hued tropical forest on fire and subtitled lyrics from an oppari generated by AI. An oppari is a mourning song or rhythmic lament sung by Tamil women at funeral gatherings. Through the music, Dia honors the indentured laborers who were brought to Malaya from South India, to grieve their dead, a historical narrative and community that is often overlooked in Chinese-majority Singapore.
Here, rubberwood–also known as parawood, a type of hardwood that comes from the rubber tree or Hevea Brasiliensis. –becomes a metaphor that points to the island’s colonial history and its continued legacy. First imported through colonial activities, rubber arrived in Malaya from Brazil via the Kew Gardens in London in the late 19th century. Rubber started as a foreign material for exploitation of the land, in the colonies but became indigenized and mobilized both a workforce and economy which birthed plantations, enveloping Southeast Asia further into a world of global extractivist capitalism. The message is clear: the land, the trees, the forests are mourned in their imminent destruction. Yet, what makes the scene even more uncanny is the presence of a drone, flying over the forest and documenting the environmental catastrophe. Together with the AI-generated oppari, the absence of human figures reveals haunting questions: Is this a post-apocalyptic world? Who are the other forms of intelligence mourning?
Rooted in Indigenous practice, deep listening is a means of emancipation where biased positionality is challenged by deemphasizing visual representation. _LAMENT H.E.A.T_’s emphasis on the folklore sound and vocal voices further enriches her practice against the backdrop of Indigenous futurism that may provide invaluable insight into our failing ecology. Dia’s work examines Singaporean and Southeast Asian Tamil identity and its relation to land and the environment. Her recent research examines the inseparable entanglement of ecological disturbance and colonialism and its legacy, and continued exploitation through global capitalism. Most recently, she has been working with CGI, game engine software, and AI as the material to reformat the visual languages of these historical narratives and their futures.
Priyageetha Dia is an interdisciplinary artist based in Singapore. She works at the intersections of the biographical and cultural production of the Tamizh identity. Nurturing speculative fiction and decolonial feminist thought, she works across digital animation, installation, and performance. Combining personal narratives and national histories to re-present the notion of the ‘future-past’, her practice unfolds the complexities of identity politics and spatial relations of the Tamizh diasporic experience in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Dia’s work offers speculative narratives on Southeast Asian plantations, which she views as sites for recovering stories of resistance. Her research interests also include building nonlinear narratives through digital semiotics, migrant histories, and our relationship with the non-human. Her practice represents an important voice from a new generation of Singaporean artists, and their unique position to discuss ecological issues through the lens of decolonization and technologically mediated reality.