Vickie Aravindhan & Ariel Navas, The Lands Of

The region of Southeast Asia holds in its bodies a specificity and a queerness. Water bodies, human bodies, land and memory bodies that have no stage or visibility — but on what stages and through whose eyes do we wish to be seen? Which audiences and what representations are desired? Our relationship with this very space and with the world after 500 years of direct European and American colonization and settling, after being the fallow grounds and corridors through which the West and the Larger East have rested, communicated, passed and infiltrated for exchange and growth, after supplying and housing resources for others, after both wars and both economic booms and after and after — our positions and relationship with the world is a queer one. Surrounded by power and veined with water freeways through which power has passed and continues to pass, Southeast Asia is a small region of small states and island-archipelago countries. Each (save one) with a different colonial daddy, all with