Earth on Display

Deforestation is Violence Against Indigeneity

Location: Harvard Museum of Natural History, Cambridge MA
Workshop, MIT Fall 2018
In Collaboration with Meng Fu Kuo, Semine Long-Callesen and Mengqi He

Part of the MIT ‘Experiments in Pedagogy’ workshops, the project on how deforestation is violence against indigeneity in Borneo Forest was presented and exhibited.

Link to Project︎︎︎

Tropical forests around the belt of equator are popularly envisioned as the lungs of our planet. They regulate the Earth’s climate by storing nearly three hundred billion tons of carbon – roughly forty times the annual greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. However, incessant deforestation jeopardizes our collective respiratory system. The island of Borneo in Southeast Asia’s Malay Archipelago retains only eight percent of its virgin forests and is facing multiple extractive pressures from coal mining, timber logging, and palm oil plantation. The corporate activities are of enormous scale: for instance, Indonesia and Malaysia are responsible for the production of eighty-three percent of the world’s palm oil, a resource used in about half of all packaged products sold in the supermarket worldwide. Deforestation is also violence against indigenous people. The forest is home to tens of thousands of indigenous peoples. Yet, the communities have no legal rights to their homeland since very few can prove legal documentation of land ownership. 

Indigeneity and industry in Borneo are entangled. They represent two world perspectives that co-inhabit the island. While being forcefully removed from their forests, indigenous peoples make use of the logging roads to visit family members. Instant noodles made from palm oil are consumed as an everyday meal. Some are recruited as manual, indentured laborers in the mines. Others operate as part of the governments’ search and rescue teams when factory accidents occur in the forest. Despite this braided interlacement between industry and indigenous mundane routines, the relationship is of abusive and unsustainable character.