The Installation

For this three-screen immersive installation we’re working with French-Indonesian animator Laura Nasir-Tamara who has brought the Dayak snake ancestor Nabau's myth to life. Viewers encounter a tropical rainforest ecosystem that is one of the planet’s richest biodiversity areas—but one increasingly under threat from mining, palm oil, and carbon offset plantations. What emerges through interviews with elders, animated retellings of Indigenous Dayak myths,  everyday life, and data visualizations are tensions between two value systems—one that relies on satellite data to measure forest carbon and another that understands the forest as an extension of community.

The installation stages a dialogue between these 'ways of knowing' in 12-minute loops of “data” layers that do not interact in the real world; but what would we learn if they did? By intentionally creating bridges between different types of “data” that have traditionally been used for different purposes (e.g., oral history as a mode of asserting community rights vs. data-powered decision making in multilateral climate policy spaces), our installation makes the link between human culture (myths, song, dance) and ecosystem health (carbon storage data) as critical for climate justice everywhere.