Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

Liminality-Route of Return is an art project that combines curatorial practice, exhibition and workshop. The project employs the experimental characteristic of open laboratory and builds upon the key concept of “borderless.” With “shifting” as the research guideline and publicness as the axis, the project aims to pervade, extend and realize an exploration about the relationship between “people” and “place” in different geopolitical contexts while prompting the audience’s re-questioning about related knowledge.

The shifting activities of humans or other species did not only take place in the modern period. Taking Nusantara (the Indonesian and Malay name of Maritime Southeast Asia) as an example, transregional movement can be traced back to the 15th century. Those who migrated to Nusantara during this early period included the Australoid, Negrito and Melanesoid. After WWII, the British colonial regime attempted to exploit the natural resources in the region and brought in a large quantity of inexpensive laborers. Furthermore, after the Opium Wars (1840-1842), Chinese minors and plantation workers moved southward into Nusantara and Borneo, pushing the movement of population to its peak.

Extensive physical shiftings have always been existing. This is not a phenomenon limited to the colonial period but a consistent process that has led to the global hybridity of species and cultures from different places in the world. Physical mobility is intricately linked to the environment, survival conditions, local politics, power relations, communities, economies, religions, etc. The term “local” is not confined to the geographical definition of national territory but based on a broader concept of “place.” Apart from the tangible aspect of “place,” it denotes a dimension of sensibility as well. This research project starts with a point of entry that seems politically incorrect at the initial stage to deconstruct the existing restriction and boundary between “place” and “land,” adopting a boundless position to reconstruct our imaginations of “land.” However, “borderless” does not equal “rootless”; instead, it tends to find an alternative route using the methodological concept as a medium to review the multilayered history of humanity and land characterized by physical mobility.

From homelands to foreign lands, from one place to another, the complex and dense characteristics of mobility in contemporary society seem to be shaped into an uncontrollable yet natural state. However, the altered sensory experiences also indicate a change in cognition. The understanding of mobility and that of place should be equal and mutually influencing rather than being unidirectional. How did the vested interests behind the waves of shifting in different periods influence the social and family structure? One needs to ask: Are people’s living conditions and values changing the social framework? Or, is the evolving social framework affecting physical mobility? Together with these changes, what other changes have occurred in our relationships to and perceptions of the land compared to that of the past?

Liminality-Route of Return invites the audience to re-examine how the dialectic between people, land and mobility responds to the trends of contemporary social structure, technology development, globalization, and so forth. Meanwhile, it facilitates fresh relations to create new experimental connections between “the local in the foreign” and “the foreign in the local” within the body and place.