Performance Seminar
This seminar asks — how do we love nature? To what extent does a love for nature inspire action? Drawing on historical research on religion and ecology in maritime Southeast Asia, assistant professor in Southeast Asian Studies and Malay Studies Faizah Zakaria (NUS) explores love for nature as fascinated enchantment, as acts of care, as protective impulses, as patient forbearance, and as motivation for the renovation of self and others. Moving across time, we will trace how our interactions with non-human beings have been mediated by religion, and later, by secularisation. Through elephants in the Malay peninsula, songbirds in postwar Singapore, and bio-remediation plants in the Lorong Halus wetlands, Zakaria aims to bring religion to what philosopher Lauren Berlant calls “a properly political concept of love” and explore its possibilities for galvanising action — or conversely, for entrenching inertia.
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Faizah Zakaria is assistant professor in the Departments of Southeast Asian Studies and Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests center on religion and ecology, environmental justice and indigenous movements in island Southeast Asia. Her first monograph The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia (2023) was published by the University of Washington Press. She is presently working on a research project on science and religion in volcanic eruptions and co-coordinates a digital humanities project on comparative Asian medicine. She received a PhD in history from Yale University in 2018.
Opens is a para-academic forum based in Singapore. Against the authoritarian-technocapitalist enclosure of the physical and discursive spaces of our island-city-state, they experiment with modes of discourse-making, space-making, and conceptual research & development intended to catalyse speculative incursions into other possible futures. Opens consists of an informal network of co-conspirators. The administrative and organising labour is currently performed by founding co-organisers Helios Singh Bajwa and Arunditha Emmanuel.