TURBINE TROPICS is a new work where Priyageetha Dia extends her fieldwork to reflect the role of imaginaries on extractive capitalism and Southeast Asian plantation narratives. While plantation corporatism forms a core tenet in her exploration, access to these plantation grounds is often elusive. These areas remain invisible to the public eye and away from scrutiny. Yet monoculture plantation industries provide a potent lens for understanding the underlying geopolitical currents that collide and entangle within these spaces. Integrating Homi K. Bhabha’s liminality theory within this postcolonial context, Dia posits the rubber plantation as a liminal space, wherein it is neither wholly natural nor entirely artificial; rather, these plantation spaces exist in a state of constant upheaval and transformation.
Emulating the visceral qualities of rubber tapping itself, TURBINE TROPICS transports the viewer to an almost otherworldly dimension that spirals infinitely into the unknown. The symbolic imagery of the spiral here is manifold. Dia reimagines the herringbone pattern of rubber tapping to bring our attention to colonial extractivism and its abiding perils even in the present day. It animates the forces of change that harness equal potential to be constructive and destructive simultaneously. Transmuting the physical environment to the ‘non-place’ Dia has construed in TURBINE TROPICS, the helical form can be seen as a representation of external forces that continue to drive the extraction of natural resources in Southeast Asia, bolstering the colonial enterprise at the expense of the environment, communities, and ecosystems. Yet this spiralling cycle, imposed by the regimes of capitalism, is never-ending. The helix thus becomes a signifier of locality, picturing how local ecology is moulded by global forces in a continuum of interdependent metamorphosis.
In The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha articulates liminality as the ‘in-between’ spaces created by complexities of cultural hybridity, and it is within these spaces that established norms are subverted and destabilised for new meanings to emerge. TURBINE TROPICS echoes this understanding, using the bark of a rubber tree as a metaphorical and imaginative site of transition, where resistance can occur within its state of flux. The spiral, unlike the vortex, allows for movement both towards the centre and away from it. The outward arcs of the spiral thus signify moments of antagonism and reclamation, where Dia attempts to reassert the region’s ecological understanding and cultural identities against the overwhelming pull of extractive practices. While her other video works tend to adopt a protagonist or an avatar to personify the spectral entity navigating digital environments, TURBINE TROPICS reflects an experimental shift away from figuration towards greater abstraction. Dia leans on the spiral-vortex dynamic to signal the complexities of postcolonial societies where cultures, histories, and identities intermingle and merge to form alternative ecologies in circular temporalities. The narration, voiced by Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology, adds a poetic dimension that is characteristic of her practice and punctuates the work with moments of introspection against ambivalence.
TURBINE TROPICS is framed within an assemblage of collapsible storage crates—seemingly mundane and utilitarian objects but hold within them a complex web of symbolisms. Often associated with movement, transition, and temporariness, these crates are emblematic of a liminal state. They occupy the interstitial space between origin and destination, concealment and revelation, dislocation and transformation. Colonial powers established intricate supply networks that facilitated the movement of resources and labour from the colonies to the imperial centres. Storage crates, functioning as vessels, embody the power dynamics inherent in these networks. They carry with them not only physical goods but also the colonial ideology and imbalance of power that characterises the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised.
Concurrently, Dia attempts to draw parallels between plantation extraction and our current phenomenon of data extraction. Where data sets have come to take precedence in a social-first economy, our sense of selves is increasingly formulated through artificial intelligence and algorithms where vast arrays of servers store, process, and manage information as though it were a physical crop. Both systems operate under a similar paradigm that commodifies what they extract—crops, labour, or data—distilling complex ecosystems into quantifiable units to be harvested. Kathryn Yusoff's A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018) examines the relationship between geology and extraction as not simply one of practical utility; but of moral and ethical implication. Geology moves beyond facilitating extraction; it is actively entangled in the “ontologies of possession and dispossession” often at the cost of displacing communities and perpetuating systemic inequalities. In Yusoff's view, extraction is not merely an economic activity but a continuation of a colonial mindset that views the Earth and its resources as materials to be conquered and used.
Juxtaposing the parallels in both modes of extraction, it presents us with our ultimate vulnerability in the face of technology—a black hole that we are all unmistakably enamoured, empowered and entrapped by, albeit to varying degrees. The notion of the black hole elucidates the imagery of the vortex, second to the spiral in TURBINE TROPICS. A vortex pulls everything to its centre in a chaotic, often violent manner. Dia recognises the gravitational attraction of monoculture plantations, acting as a centripetal force in brutally absorbing land, resources, labour, and cultural practices to transmute them into something else entirely: a commodified mass product stripped bare of history and origin only to be shaped by its eventual functionality. Where the relation between past and present is temporal and continuous, Dia’s speculative narratives become a means of resisting the replication of colonial accounts. The hyperreal representation of the bark structure spiralling into an abyss creates a representational freedom of its own where it extends or distends from the circle. Characterised by ambiguity and disorientation, TURBINE TROPICS is not merely emblematic of worlds collapsing inwards but are also gestural lines that beckon towards uncharted territories. Dia's work urges us to acknowledge the consuming nature of technological and colonial forces as well as envision ways of unspooling and reorienting these forces.