Exhibition: Minor Infelicities

Dates: July 18 – August 2, 2020

Location: Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, South Korea

Curators: Abhijan Toto (Thailand/South Korea), Bing Hao (Singapore), Carlos Quijon, Jr. (Philippines), Gyusik Lee (Korea), Jens Cheung (Hong Kong)

Organized by: Jinhee Park (Korea)

Supported by: Seoul Metropolitan Government, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Post Territory Ujeongguk

Exhibiting Artists: Carlo Paulo Pacolor, Isola Tong, Isaac Chong Wai, Jang-won Choi, Kim Dujin and Norah Lea

Vivarium explores the poetic potential of the Arroceros Forest Park in Manila, a rare urban forest sustained through the care and activism of the women of the Winner Foundation. As a space where multiple species, materials, and agencies coexist, the park becomes a queer topos, an ecology of interdependent lifeforms that resists fixed identities and dominant narratives of isolation and self-sufficiency. Through this lens, the forest is framed as a site where wild life thrives, elaborating on the intricate entanglements of environment, atmosphere, and agency.

The concept of “transdimension” situates Vivarium within an expanded field of queer ecology, where the boundaries between human and nonhuman, natural and constructed, are continuously unsettled. The work imagines Arroceros as an urban forest of translocations, a dynamic spatiality in perpetual transformation, offering a speculative site for trans and femme representation and resistance. Transness emerges not only as identity but as a relational mode of existence, shaping and being shaped by the complexity and flux of ecological entanglement.

This ecological vivarium rejects rigid binaries, instead proposing an interdependent world where multiple agencies flourish in mutual constitution. These queer becomings hack into, trail, root, feed, and grow within the cracks of dominant systems, troubling the artificial separations between nature and culture, stability and flux. In doing so, Vivarium of Agencies invites us to imagine an alternative ecology; one that which revels in anachronism, multiplicity, and transformation, centering queerness as a site of unruly flourishing.