Tropical Lab is an annual international art camp organised by LASALLE College of the Arts for master’s degree and PhD candidates. Led by Senior Fellow Professor Milenko Prvački over two weeks, students from international arts schools and institutions undertake workshops and seminars in Singapore exploring various aspects of history, geography, culture and aesthetics.
About the theme
An open space, Terra invites critical reflection on the lived environment as well as the contested terrains of territory, belonging and resource distribution—not neutral, but a negotiated terrain framed by archaeologists of geopolitics. It speaks to histories and the presence of cultivation, colonisation, extraction and habitation, while pointing to emergent futures of sustainability, stewardship and survival.
With the world captivated by artificial and computational presence, terra emerges as a pivotal terra synthetic realm of data and machine intelligence, shaping our perception of the world.
Terra refers to the earth as firm ground (terra firma), to fragility and fired craft (terra cotta), and to the planetary and terrestrial as domains of human and non-human life. Artists and thinkers have engaged with terra as material and idea – drawn to its fractured fragilities: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks (1982), Khvay Samnang’s Where is My Land? (2014), Tang Da-Wu’s She Asked the Forest for a Moment of Stillness (2023), underscore terra as both material and metaphor for cultural, ecological, metaphysical and social negotiations. Theoretically, the concept of terra has come under tremendous scrutiny, and scholars such as Bruno Latour (2018) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021) have drawn attention to questions of development, ecology, and epistemic justice.
Across these perspectives, terra emerges as base, system and allegory in flux. It is the firm ground on which we stand to describe who we are. Or can we?
Participating institutions
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
California Institute of the Arts
Central Academy of Fine Arts, China
Columbia University
École supérieure d’arts & médias de Caen/Cherbourg, France
LASALLE College of the Arts
Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda
Musashino Art University
Nagoya University of Arts and Sciences
National Art School, Sydney
Nelson Mandela University
RMIT University
Universitas Gadjah Mada
University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca
University of Arts in Belgrade
University of the Arts London
University of Washington
University of California, Davis
Zurich University of the Arts
Curator
Helen O’Toole
