Paul Bröker

Building on the foraging and cooking practices of the Simpang Dayak community of West Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), the team worked with the traditional indigenous knowledge school Arus Kualan to co-design a network of spaces and paths in their forest territory. These spaces act as both educational and occupation infrastructure in the face of proliferating Big Palm Oil, while the paths between the spaces promote regular monitoring of the landscape. Together, they form an ecosystem of geochoreographies (Caycedo, 2016), laced with joy and stewardship.

This is a video montage exploring the proximities and conflicts between fact + fiction, awe + destruction, present + future, and our complex, turbulent relationship with storms and water, the giver and taker of life.

It asks the questions:

_Can we admire and fear storms at the same time?

_Is there such thing as a natural disaster?

_How will we live when we are all engulfed by the sea?

Maybe we belong in the ocean, back where we came from... 

This is a compilation; all textual, audio and visual extracts are from others' pieces of work: fictional, scientific and speculative.

You decide.

Thanks to Captain Bahar Noorizadeh + the M.S.5 Subsurface Exploration Unit

[Media Studies final submission, RCA SoA 2022]

We can learn a lot about a person through food; we express our identities and stories by what we eat and a shared meal provides the setting for getting to know one another. Anthony Bourdain’s television show Parts Unknown was a series of documentaries exploring diverse cultures around the world, using food as an entry point for discussion; Bourdain was the sensory ethnographer, pushing a progressive political agenda. As a white Western man, he encountered many people less privileged than him, sharing food and discussing the issues they face with them. This portfolio examines methods of cultural research, in terms of navigating a globally imbalanced world, interacting with people and sharing findings. Anthony Bourdain and Parts Unknown act as a case study of anthropology from a Western perspective. What can researchers learn from Bourdain’s studies? I conclude that embracing contradiction - conviction and open-mindedness, similarity and difference, clarity and ambiguity, finding answers and asking questions - and developing and owning honest opinions are crucial tools for us all as we continue learning about each other and sharing our worlds.

Alternative radio networks have long played a pivotal part in resistance movements. Their affordability, accessibility and outreach lend themselves well to grassroots causes. With the rise in influence of online platforms in organising social action, is there still a case for continuing to establish sound transmission networks? This essay explores the specific strengths of oral-aural communication in order to evaluate the relevance, efficacy and merit of radio networks today. It looks at a variety of textual case studies of past and current alternative radio stations from academic sources and magazines. It also uses several current online alternative radio stations as objects of context and research, both through listening to their broadcasts and visiting their headquarters. Using the findings of this research, I will assess whether an alternative radio network is an appropriate, feasible and ultimately useful and powerful intervention in my own fieldwork in West Kalimantan, Borneo [Indonesia] as the Simpang Dayak take on industrial palm oil plantations.