Ecology: Relational: Reflected was developed during a five-week residency at Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts & Culture in Ratchaburi, Thailand. In this project, I approached a local coconut plantation as a site of cultural, socio-economic, and ecological entanglement, shaped by the interdependent labor of both human and nonhuman actors. Drawing on my family’s long-standing involvement in the fruit and vegetable trade, I sought to engage the plantation not simply as a space of production, but as a layered landscape through which “submerged perspectives” could be made visible. These are embedded forms of knowledge often obscured within extractive systems.

Through participative fieldwork and material experimentation, including the crafting of handmade paper from locally gathered plant fibres, migrant workers living and working on the plantation were invited to reimagine the territory from their own lived experience. These counter-maps, composed through drawing, writing, collage, and found materials, bring attention to perspectives and forms of knowledge that are frequently excluded from official narratives. With the support of a local expert, I also collaborated with stingless bees, small pollinators essential to the plantation’s productivity. Their interaction with plant-based papers placed in the beehives introduced an additional layer of multi-species collaboration and ecological insight.

Instead of aiming to represent the plantation, Ecology: Relational: Reflected proposes new ways of sensing and relating to it, opening space for marginalized perspectives to surface through shared, rather than singular, forms of artistic expression.