Between the Mountains and the Sea: Human-Nature Relations in Southeast Asia

Looking at the geography and morphology of Southeast Asia, the connection between water bodies and mountains is evident. Mountainous regions offer protection and hiding places from empires and colonial forces, as well as providing informal trade and migration routes (Scott Reference Scott2009). Mountains also hold a symbolic importance for Hindu and Buddhist religions and in many animisms among the pantheon of deities and spirits in Southeast Asia. According to Hinduism, Mount Meru in Nepal is the seat of the Gods, surrounded by the ocean of worlds (Kulke Reference Kulke2001). The idea of the mountain connecting the spiritual world with the here and now is represented in the architecture of the early empires in Southeast Asia, for example, in the world’s largest Buddhist temple at Borobodur on Java or the Bayon temple of the Angkor empire. The cosmic mountain contains all life and nature and is where the gods dwell (Jurriëns Reference Jurriëns2023: 43). While some readings of this multinaturalism reject human sovereignty over the environment, Anscheidt (Reference Arnscheidt2009) shows by analysing debates on nature conservation in Indonesia that a simplistic dichotomy between premodern and modern worldview does not hold, but rather appears as many discursive layers in practices. However, the interplay between mountain and water is central to the cultures of both mainland and peninsular Southeast Asia, where creation myths connect water to the mountain spirits. In Indonesia, the marriage between the Queen of the South Sea and the volcano Merapi is celebrated in a ritual in Yogyakarta. In Javanese and Sudanese mythology, Ratu Kidul, the queen or princess of the Southern Ocean, is the guardian of central Java and rules her empire from a magnificent palace below the waves (Lombard Reference Lombard1980; Schlehe Reference Schlehe1998).

The relationship between humans and the water and the sea is deeply inscribed in Southeast Asian history and culture. Tanah Air (land–water) denotes the Indonesian archipelago by naming its elements and is highly charged with symbolic and emotional meaning. More recently, however, the term has acquired a nationalist connotation. Maimunah (Reference Maimunah2022) proposes reclaiming it from nationalism for its human and non-human inhabitants by including the body (tubuh), whereby Tubuh Tanah Air denotes the archipelago from the perspective of feminist political ecology. Another reference to nature is Ibu Pertiwi or mother earth. In Vietnam, the founding myth of Âu Cơ links the people and the soil to the mountains and the sea. The Vietnamese are the offspring of the union between the mountain fairy Âu Cơ and the water dragon Lạc Long Quân. Âu Cơ gave birth to 100 children, 50 of them boys and 50 of them girls. Upon the parents’ separation, 50 of the children retreated along with the father towards the coast, and the remainder went with the mother towards the mountains. This myth can be understood as a metaphor for the relationship between humans and more-than-humans in Southeast Asia in general. The interplay of mountain and water bodies was also decisive for the choice of location of the royal capital Thăng Long in the 11^th century, according to geomantic principles. The Tan Vien Mountain in particular, and the Northern mountains in general, were to protect the city located at the banks of the Red River (Tran Reference Tran, Clément and Lancret2001). Until today, the principle of phong thủy, wind and water, is used in architecture and construction in the city, which is now called Hanoi. Each sacred site is built along a waterfront and protected by mountains in the back. The interplay of local traditions, cultural ideology, and sacred water sites in Vietnam plays a role in legitimising dominance, and social resistance (Koppen Reference Koppen2024).

During the New Order (1967–1998) in Indonesia, the authoritarian President Suharto used state and military control to depoliticise society and promote economic development. Resistance to the social and environmental effects of these policies led to a merging of contemporary art and environmental activism, which Jurrriens (Reference Jurriëns2023) calls ‘artivism’. He identifies emancipatory potential in the post-natural artwork of this period, which exemplifies the vital role of creativity in oppositional movements. By revealing hidden sensory, mental, and intimate connections through art, artivism politicises nature and the environment. Artivism is able to create affects and effects by representing these connections and thereby triggering socio-political engagement, collaboration, networking, and innovation. Such forms of artivism continue to play a crucial role in environmental struggles throughout reformasi (1998 – 2004) until today. In Vietnam, the one-party state seeks to undermine political opposition, e.g., through a high degree of state control in public space. In the last decade, particularly environmental movements have been targets of state repression. Since large-scale street protests are quickly dissolved, urbanites seek to raise public awareness for environmental issues through performances. Art emerges as central for imagining alternative ways of life and, thence, of co-becoming. It offers ways to engage with matters that create new knowledge.

Founding myths reveal that the notion of sharing the same soil as a nation (see Caldwell Reference Caldwell2011) is both political and ethical. Humans need to acknowledge and cherish nature as their origin and, thence, act as custodians rather than as rulers over land. What we concurrently observe in contemporary Southeast Asia are, thence, practices of environmental protection and artivism that are informed by premodern and modern worldviews. We acknowledge that mulinaturalism in Hindu and Buddhist religions did not reject human sovereignty over nature per se. Both in pre-colonial Java and Northern Vietnam (Đại Việt) nature was subjected to human rule and authority. While in Java the natural environment was subject to a subordinate-and-rule discourse, in Đại Việt the ruler was held responsible for natural disasters and thence seen as the master over nature (Anscheidt Reference Arnscheidt2009; Nguyen Reference Nguyen Khac1993). Instead, we suggest examining the performative practices outlined in the following as a set of many different discursive layers that result from local and indigenous knowledges as well as modern approaches to environmental protection. Yet, what surfaces in the two case studies is the idea that humans ought to take care of the soil which they cultivate, as a legacy of ancestors that needs to be cherished. This is manifest in the two case studies presented below: the performative handling of seeds in Indonesia and the protest performances in Hanoi, where trees are considered animate beings, possessing agency, yet needing human support for their survival. We compare the performativity of co-becoming along the dimensions of 1) representation, 2) creative expression, and 3) multispecies relations. Performative representations enable the interrogation of the hegemony and the articulation of new ideas about technoenvironments. We analyse artivism and creative forms under the conditions of semi-authoritarianism. Last but not least, we decipher the joint performance of people and plants as mediators between interconnected, yet distinct, realms.

Technoenvironments

Technoenvironments address the interlinkage between technologies and the socio-political realm. They are constituted and mediated by material infrastructures, connecting and simultaneously excluding people, more-than-humans, things, and ideas. The lens of technoenvironments, focuses on evolving networks that bind non-animate and animate life together and are shaped by mutual agency, care, and resistance. The authors regard technoenvironments as both an ethical and political shift in thinking about progress and the future. Technological change and progress have been embraced by many Southeast Asian nations since the 1970s. However, we have now reached a point in time where adverse effects with regard to the degradation of soils, waters, climate change, and biodiversity loss have become clearer than ever. In Indonesia and Vietnam, this has resulted in a heightened awareness of how to create habitable and liveable places in rural and urban areas for humans and more-than-humans. In the two case studies of performative representations of people’s entanglements with their more-than-human environment, trees, plants, seeds, and soil become active and animate agents. We draw on the concept of “plural ecologies” that combines approaches from political ecology and the anthropology of ontologies to understand in which instances more-than-human-actors are comprehended as animate beings (Duile et al. Reference Duile2023). Guido Sprenger and Kristina Großmann (Reference Geertman and Boudreau2018: x) explain that peasants or urbanites might appear as human actors, whereas plants, soils animals, and spirits might be cast as more-than-human actors. Whether these beings are seen as agentive or passive, connected or disconnected, etc., depends on the particular ecologies they find themselves in. Ways of relating to each other and being recognised are, therefore, part of the ontological or cosmological aspect of an ecology.

Under the term “technonature” White and Wilbert (Reference White, Wilbert, White and Wilbert2010) identify a range of political schools of thought between a focus on deliberative ways of containing technological change (Swyngedouw Reference Swyngedouw, White and Wilbert2010), on cultural imaginaries of environmentalism (Hinchliffe and Whatmore Reference Hinchliffe, Whatmore, White and Wilbert2010) and on socio-eco-technical remaking, emphasising the mutually related notions of hope and adventure (White and Wilbert Reference White, Wilbert, White and Wilbert2010: 25). The notion “technonature” serves as the ethical or political starting point for environmental politics, questioning the vantage point from which everything involving humans appears as degraded. The three topics of hybridity, agency, and the level of analysis also emerge as central in the debate on technoenvironments.

In this article, we relate technoenvironments to different concepts derived from feminist political ecology as well as Southern epistemologies. Feminist political ecology is less a cognitive concept and more an affirmation of the importance of being in the world, lifeworldly practices, and the mutually constituted ideas of gendered humans, nature, and technology (Elmhirst Reference Elmhirst, Perreault, Bridge and McCarthy2015). Southern epistemologies comprise ways of knowing that build on experiences and knowledges from the so-called Global South. Both strands of thought seek to contest the hegemony of Northern knowledge (Solera and Ortecho Reference Solera, Jesús Ortecho, Harcourt, Agostino, Elmhirst, Gómez and Kotsila2023), while focusing on knowledge gained through practice, in particular via embodiment. These approaches take the senses seriously, as well as affects and non-cognitive dimensions of being in the world. Developing these ideas, Wendy Harcourt (Reference Harcourt2009) introduces the concept of “body politics” to visualise the body as a deeply political arena and as the main sites where culture and power intersect. While embodiment is recognised as being central to human actors’ being in the world, embodied ways of knowing are key to the “becoming-with” of humans and more-than-humans (Haraway Reference Haraway2008).

Plants, animals, and people’s bodies display a material resistance to social interaction (Padmanabhan Reference Padmanabhan2016: 90) with their idiosyncratic property and agency. Beyond living matter, inanimate material poses a challenge to sense-making and co-becoming. Mind and matter are mutually co-constructed in an ongoing process (Wilson Reference Wilson, Alaimo and Hekman2008). In the same vein, material feminism perceives nature as agentic, whereby its acts have consequences for the human and non-human world (Elmhirst and Darmastuti Reference Elmhirst, Darmastuti, Lund, Doneys and Resurrección2015). Barad’s (Reference Barad2003) agential realism asks “how matter comes to matter” and adopts a post-humanist, performative approach to analysing techno-scientific and natural-cultural practices, while recognising the dynamic force of the material. She shifts the focus away from the representation of reality towards practices, actions, and doing in “intra-actions” that are at once material, discursive, human, more-than–human, corporeal, and technological – and at the centre of technoenvironments. The notion of intra-action points to the material as an active agent in the world, calling into question well-maintained borders between humans and non-humans, just as the material resistance of body and biodiversity invites (re-)consideration of the relations between body, soil, and trees. At “negotiations at the intraface” (Padmanabhan Reference Padmanabhan2016), the influence of scientific framings and the inherent power structures of gender relations are contested and considered as situated knowledge (Haraway 1988). The Indonesian case study presented below is framed by the technocratic perspective of the Green Revolution on agriculture as an input-output relation, which can be managed by top-down expert knowledge, enabled by legal and financial institutions, and applied to the soil, which is conceptualised as a sponge-like medium for fertiliser and seeds. In response to the unintended consequences of this instrumental approach, such as pest outbreaks and contamination of waterbodies, organic farming took off in the 1980s, when grass-roots organisations promoting sustainable agricultural practices sprang up across the archipelago (Edwards Reference Edwards and Ford2013; Jahroh Reference Jahroh2010: 2). From 2000 onwards, the Indonesian state devised policies to regulate organic agriculture, in which, however, a productivist approach still prevails (Ehlert and Padmanabhan Reference Ehlert and Padmanabhan2025; Laksmana and Padmanabhan Reference Padmanabhan, van den Berg, Tobar, Depuis and Harcourt2021; Tamtomo Reference Tamtomo2021). These policies focus on input substitution and ignore more holistic concepts of organic agriculture that integrate organic, inorganic, and human spheres. Thus, agriculture emerges as a technoenvironment where ideas about the relationships between actors and actants, and the hybridity of assemblages of soil, plants, and farmers are highly contested. Against this background, the artistic intervention unfolds and is analysed.

In the Vietnamese case study, the technoenvironment comprises an assemblage of humans, specifically the citizens of Hanoi, engaging with more-than-humans such as trees, and material and non-material infrastructures like streets and social media. As in the Indonesian case, urban planning in Vietnam adopts a top-down approach, leaving little room for public participation. Moreover, although Vietnam is a socialist country, the Communist Party embraces the idea of a market economy, in which urban development is driven by neoliberal principles. In the case presented here, ancient trees are required to make way for infrastructural development, in pursuance of the ideal of a civilized and modern city.

Who Speaks and Who Listens in Technoenvironments?

A feminist political ecology approach is thus well fitted to ask questions about representation: about who speaks for whom and who listens to whom, and which knowledge is produced by speaking and listening subjects. Especially under authoritarianism, creative and artistic protests emerge as ways to articulate new ideas about technoenvironments and interrogate hegemonic notions of nature as a resource. Art becomes a powerful force for raising awareness and addressing issues such as socioeconomic inequality and climate change. Particularly in Southeast Asia, where civil society in (semi-)authoritarian regimes often has little room to manoeuvre, citizens increasingly employ creative and artistic ways to contest the authoritarian state and protect against the environmental crisis.

In the following, we explore two cases of performative practices in Indonesia and Vietnam, where people, soil, and plants perform together. We unfold the comparison along the lines of the three dimensions of 1) representation, 2) creative expression, and 3) multispecies relations.

According to the levels of analysis proposed by White and Wilbert (Reference White, Wilbert, White and Wilbert2010), the creative protests around the felling of trees in a city of eight million people in Vietnam and the ascription of a subject position to these plants in the public space are juxtaposed with the more intimate setting of an art performance embedded in a transdisciplinary research project focusing on organic agriculture in Indonesia. The Vietnamese case is concerned with the spontaneous unfolding of creative protest performances against massive tree cutting in the inner city in 2015, and the Indonesian case analyses the performance embedded in an academic research setting in 2017. A reassessment through the lens of technoenvironments unearths multispecies entanglements. In the following, we elaborate on the methods applied.

Transdisciplinary research provides the setting for the Indonesian case. The research project IndORGANIC examined farmers’ knowledge, adoption barriers, values and belief systems, and political and institutional structures (Padmanabhan Reference Padmanabhan, Kurfürst and Wehner2020, Reference Padmanabhan, van den Berg, Tobar, Depuis and Harcourt2021). Central to the transdisciplinary project design on the evolution of organic farming was a series of annual transdisciplinary workshops that required collaboration with actors beyond academia, such as civic or non-government organisations, artists, policymakers, and activists (Fritz et al. Reference Fritz2021). Art-based research is a specific form of knowledge production to enrich transdisciplinary research (Leavy Reference Leavy2020). For the first workshop in 2017, the renowned Indonesian artist Arahmaiani was invited to present her performance “Memory of Nature”Footnote ¹. The Indonesian case is a micro-study of an artist’s interventionin a workshop setting with invited participants. Martina conducted participant observation during the artistic performance, while documenting and recording the process, while transparently acting as host of the transdisciplinary workshop “The state of organic farming on Java” on December 9^th, 2017, in Yogyakarta.

Protest research acknowledges the contribution of performative practices, in both online and physical urban spaces, to social movements in authoritarian contexts (Juris Reference Juris2012) and provides the framing for the Vietnamese case. The study of the creative protest practices in response to the planned felling of more than 6,000 trees in the city of Hanoi involved both remote and digital ethnography, as well as participant observation and semi-structured interviews on the ground. According to John Postill (Reference Postill, Hjorth, Horst, Galloway and Bell2017), remote ethnography offers opportunities to participate asynchronously in events after they have already taken place. Digital ethnography, by contrast, focuses on social interactions online, while stressing the need to follow actors both online and offline. Since Sandra was not in Hanoi when the protests occurred in spring 2015, she used the go-along method when, six months later, she visited the places where the felling and protests had occurred. In addition, she undertook a content analysis of the reporting of the issue by Vietnam’s main media outlets.

For both case studies, photographs and videos documenting the events were transcribed and/or translated and analysed using the qualitative data analysis software ATLAS.ti. In line with the focus of research in both Indonesia and Vietnam on feminist theories and embodied ways of knowing, we paid particular attention to the sensations experienced during multispecies encounters, such as the touching, smelling, and handling of soil and plants in the Indonesian case, and the hugging, listening to, and speaking with trees in Hanoi.

Multiplying Performers in Participatory Art in Indonesia: Can Seeds, Soil and Pak Choi Speak and Who Listens to Them?

Participatory performance art is a way to unearth unconscious notions of technoenvironments as assemblages of material artefacts, more-than-humans, and humans. This was the intention when the Indonesian artist Arahamiani embedded her interactive performance “Memory of Nature” into a transdisciplinary research workshop in 2017. Invited participants were all involved in organic agriculture, either as practitioners, policymakers, activists, or scholars from Tasikmalaya and Yogyakarta. The intention was to stimulate reflection on the collective imaginaries of organic farming through participatory art (Leavy Reference Leavy2020).

Arahmaiani had performed “Memory of Nature” for the first time at the Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum Shanghai in 2013 (Jurriëns Reference Jurriëns2023). She received her inspiration from Tibetian monks in 2010, where she learnt about Buddhism and a central device in this tradition, the mandala. These symmetrical figures incorporate a circle set in a square, signifying space and circular time (Jung Reference Jung1972). They are created for meditation and, in the Tibetan tradition, destroyed immediately afterwards. On this occasion, Arahmaiani’s participatory art performance linked her involvement in environmental practices in Tibet to the largest Buddhist temple in the world in Borobodur, Java, Indonesia. Inside a wooden frame depicting the outline of the Borobudur stone stupa, a varadatu mandala Footnote ² portrays the universe, with the lifeworld of desires, desirelessness, and finally formless nirvana. This particular mandala was filled with soil, where mung beans were sown (Figure 1). They grew and wilted during the display, evoking the act of ascending and descending the three-tiered steps of the temple (Arahmaiani 2013). On each side of this central mandala, participants were invited to sit on the floor around low tables and create their own mandalas out of different kinds of seeds.

Figure 1.

Pak choi plants, seeds and soil in the Boborbodur mandala.

Source: IndORGANIC.

Seeds are the material of choice for the assemblage of the mandalas. With their innate capacity to germinate and ultimately procreate or serve as food, their life-bearing quality is instrumental in evoking “Memories of Nature”. The specific seeds selected represent agrobiodiversity and the millennia of purposive selection and tending by humans on which their existence and survival depend. They thus embody the interaction and intra-action among men and women farmers and their crops. The inert qualities of living matter make humans act, and thus have agency, including the agency to resist. However, as Candraningrum (Reference Candraningrum, Candraningrum, Arianti and Aqirul2023) shows through an ecofeminist lens, old trees, rivers, and other species have been deprived of rights, while the utility perspective, for example, of breeders in seeds gains legal protection. The setting of the workshop required altered temporalities: Instead of the mandalas being destroyed immediately and the materials sourced from the environment returned by immersion into a river, the seed mandalas remained in place for two days. This allowed participants to continuously interact, meditate on them, and voice their perceptions. As the mung plants had only started to germinate after two days, they were supplemented by pregrown pak choi seedlings. Thus, significant changes occurred to the originally intended performance.

However, pak choi seedlings were grown in tiny polyethylene bags, and some were planted in the mandalas, while others remained in the room (Figure 2) . Although it was not intended, pak choi became a central more-than-human actor in the performance. The low tables urged people to sit on the floor when working on the mandala with plates full of local seeds of different sizes, shapes, and colours (Figure 3). After an introduction by Arahmaiani, participants self-selected into four groups to work on their mandala. After about an hour, the groups presented their four very different mandalas, and participants discussed the process and the results.

Figure 2.

The material actors: pak choi plants.

Source: IndORGANIC.

Figure 3.

Participants handling seeds to jointly construct a mandala.

Source: IndORGANIC.

In what follows, we focus on the analysis of the multispecies relations in this setting, representing different images of technoenvironments through creative expression; the participatory process is analysed elsewhere (Padmanabhan Reference Padmanabhanforthcoming). We describe the unfolding agency of men and women: farmers, policy makers, activists, and researchers. Alongside these actors, seeds, soil, and plants become actants (Barad Reference Barad2003), shaping the performance as a conversation between humans and more-than-humans on social-ecological relations (Schreer and Padmanabhan Reference Padmanabhan, Kurfürst and Wehner2020). We describe the different mandalas, their interpretation by participants, and discuss them as expressions of technoenvironments in the field of organic agriculture.

The “cultural mandala” (Figure 4) is composed of triangles, which form larger triangles and squares. The small triangles are nested in the larger pattern, which replicates them at a larger scale. The pattern resembles the batik tambal blankets that are used to cover a sick person as part of their cure. While women participants suggested this interpretation, to the men in the group, the mandala suggested “diversity in unity”, the Indonesian national motto. Considering rukun - spiritual and social communal harmony - as the ultimate common good by these Javanese men, they emphasise the primacy of rasa as inner spiritual feeling (Atikaputri Reference Atikaputri2024). Seeds are the medium of this pattern, symbolising biodiversity, in which different fauna and flora together establish ecosystems that are resilient and able to recover from shocks. Several axes of symmetry run through the mandala, and it can be looked at in different ways, focusing on the centre or on the equality and similarity of the small subsections alongside one other. The mandala looks settled, strong, and harmonious. This stability is emphasised by the counterpoint created by the assemblage of pak choi seedlings in plastic bags at the centre of the mandala. The contrast in texture and colours is stark: the dormant seeds, spread out flat in subtle yellowish colours, surround the lush green of the erect seedlings which, rooted in glistening plastic sachets, literally stand out. Although not originally intended to play an active role in the performance, the seedlings have been appropriated by the participants and integrated into the two-dimensional structure of the mandala, hinting at its abstraction from a three-dimensional landscape. The pak choi seedlings become actants in their own right, adding a further dimension to the mandala and the possibilities it suggests. A representation of an organic technoenvironment emerges in the creative expression as a healing and harmonious texture, pierced by the anarchic energy of the animate plants.

Figure 4.

The cultural mandala.

Source: M. Padmanabhan.

In the “spiritual mandala” (Figure 5) the sun sits at the centre, with a circle of brown beans, outlined by red ones, branching out into sunrays. An alternative reading sees this as a sunflower, with petals formed from different shades of yellowish corn outlined with black seeds. The starlike figure seems to float on a bed of red rice seeds, framed by a thick black diamond, separating the symmetrical centre of the mandala from the surrounding heaps of soil. Four roughly shaped fields of seeds in each corner of the mandala are surrounded by pak choi seedlings. While the inner part presents a strict geometric pattern composed only of seeds, the surrounding piles of earth resemble cultivated fields with freshly sown crops of different varieties. The little green pak choi plants resemble a living fence protecting the fields. A benevolent sun watches over the earth, and the agricultural efforts are labeled “organic”. The mandala extends the potential of the pak choi seedling and its muddy medium by using the soil to create farmland under the dominating sun. The planted fields speak of routines in handling seeds and soil, giving less priority to symmetry for its own sake. In creating the mandala, the participating farmers enact sowing and planting in a landscape, thus representing a technoenvironment that emphasises the interaction between multiple species and matter in the spirit of organic.

Figure 5.

The spiritual mandala.

Source: M. Padmanabhan.

While the “cultural” and the “spiritual mandala” both make creative use of the pak choi seedlings and the soil they grow in, the “political mandala” (Figure 6) goes one step further, introducing the plastic seedling bags into the picture to symbolise the inescapable entanglement of agriculture with different aspects of capitalism and modernity (Laksmana and Padmanabhan Reference Padmanabhan, van den Berg, Tobar, Depuis and Harcourt2021). Swirls of different seeds and of pak choi planted in soil are mixed with swirls of rubbish from the discarded plastic bags that formerly held the seedlings. The group integrates rubbish – an omnipresent companion of humans in public spaces in Indonesia – into the mandala. The epicentre of the spiral is a little heap of soil, which supports an erect wooden pencil, hotel merchandise from the lobby that provides another opportunity for the creative use of mundane objects, in this case to represent the power of knowledge. The mandala allows for a creative expression of technoenvironment as the contradictory co-presence of destructive and life-sustaining forces.

Figure 6.

The political mandala.

Source: M. Padmanabhan.

The “academic mandala” (Figure 7) depicts a large yin-yang pictogram resting in a bed of soil dotted with a forest of pak choi plants. The intertwined shapes of the two halves of the yin-yang symbol represent young mango leaves. In the mandala, they are delineated by different kinds of colourful beans, and each is filled with a mix of two seed types. The two corresponding dots of the yin and the yang are composed of three varieties of seed, evoking the image of an eye with a pupil in the middle. This is a variation on the traditional black and white yin-yang icon, where contrasting black and white dots are nested in the opposite-coloured halves. With this reference to a philosophical system, the predominantly male academics in the group retreat to existing signifiers of harmonious and cyclical human–nature relations. This version of a technoenvironment gives expression to a rather abstract notion of simultaneous forces in a multispecies setting.

Figure 7.

The academic mandala.

Source: M. Padmanabhan.

In these mandalas, participants break through the confines of the established performance “Memory of Nature”, enacting their images of the organic with pak choi, seeds, and soil. All three mediums acquire agency as more-than-humans, creating “variously sized collectives of human and non-human actants” (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink Reference Gibson-Graham and Roelvink2010: 342). The entanglement and engagement of humans with non-human beings find a visual representation in the different mandalas. The art performance stimulates the expression of new ideas about technoenvironments, interrogating hegemonic ideas of productivist agriculture.

With their green foliage and their need for moisture, sunlight, soil, and nutrients, the living pak choi provoked the workshop participants to explore new possibilities in the creation of their mandalas. Just as urban campaigners attributed subject positions to the trees in Hanoi, as described below, the community of organic-leaning people at the workshop incorporated them into their thinking, creating, and meaning-making. The vibrant vitality of the pak choi seedlings was incorporated into the mandalas as a counterpoint to the solidity of the surrounding seeds (the cultural mandala), as inhabitants of a miniature agricultural landscape (the spiritual mandala), as carriers of hope and growth side by side in the whirlwind of waste (the political mandala), and as an actual and concrete forest of seedlings surrounding the highly abstract philosophical notion of yin-yang (the academic mandala).

Last but not least, the soil escaped from the confines of the plastic bags, entering the room to take part in the performance. Participants allowed the soil to break free from its role as an unseen servant, a mere container for the plants and provider of their needs. Soil is more than this, and more than the sum of its parts; its organic and inorganic matter forms alliances with other-than-human entities, including fungi, bacteria, and other tiny living or fermenting beings. Following its clandestine arrival on the centre stage of the art performance, the immobile heaps of soil displayed an agentic force that provoked participants to recall the ground of their agricultural endeavours. In technoenvironments actants like pencils and plastic bags emerge, other-than-humans such as pak choi and soil display agency in their own time.

The art performance “Memory of Nature” was conducive to evoking different representations of what “organic” means, through the mandalas and their elaboration by participants, which made visions of organic tangible. Thus, the performative act echoes the manifold everyday acts of resistance as highlighted in the Indonesian Ekofeminsime debate (Candraningrum Reference Candraningrum, Candraningrum, Arianti and Aqirul2023). The performative acts are challenging the dominant narratives of productivity and utility by embodying other versions of being and relating. The representations are the result of creative expression and the underlying multispecies relations. These artistic representations of collective imaginaries of technoenviroments manifest themselves on an abstract level in a secluded setting in Indonesia. Contrasting, the public protest performances out in the open in Vietnam include majestic trees, not merely seedlings. However, though operating on different levels, both cases exemplify that technoenvironments are the assemblage of material artefacts, more-than-humans and humans.

The Affects of Knowing and Performing as Citizens in Vietnam: Can Trees Speak?

Hanoi, the capital of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, has thousands of old trees, some dating back to colonial times. Here, we explore the relationship and performativity of human and more-than-human assemblages in an unfolding protest against cutting down these trees. In this context, technoenvironments appear as assemblages of humans (citizens of Hanoi), more-than-humans, such as trees and microbes, and material and non-material infrastructures, such as streets and social media. Cities in Southeast Asia are symbols of progress, modernity, and in Vietnam also of civilisation (đô thị văn minh, hiện đại) - a state of society, and accordingly a status that a human settlement can achieve. Urban development in Vietnam follows a top-down approach, not leaving much room for civil society participation in urban planning processes, but citizens find opportunities to negotiate and challenge municipal policies (Gibert and Segard Reference Gibert and Segard2015). Although the importance of urban green spaces for the liveability of the city is acknowledged by urban planners in Vietnam (Fuhrmann and Kurfürst Reference Fuhrmann, Kurfürst, Krass, Diez, Garschagen and Hoa2023), urban development everywhere remains a highly human-centred undertaking. Much like agriculture, making cities primarily serves the needs of humans. Post-developmentalists such as Arturo Escobar (Reference Escobar and Sachs1992) criticise planning as an instrument of domination and social control that embodies deeply ingrained unequal power relations. Escobar (Reference Escobar and Sachs1992: 133) identifies the reification of space and objectification of people as specific practices of town planning that have an enormous impact on the social and spatial environment of the city. Moreover, as Houston et al. (Reference Houston2018: 195) argue, while planning considers humans as “active knowers, decision-makers and place makers”, more-than-humans are objectified and not recognised in the making of the city as active knowledge holders, nor as political subjects (Metzger Reference Metzger, Kirwan, Dawney and Brigstocke2015). Cities appear to have “risen above the physical constraints of ‘nature’” more than any other places in the world. However, these appearances mask the multispecies entanglement of humans and more-than-humans that mutually shape urban life worlds (Byrne and Wolch Reference Byrne and Wolch2009; Houston et al. Reference Houston2018: 192).

A city attuned to these multispecies entanglements would include more-than-humans as political subjects in the production of urban space, as a requirement for socially and environmentally just development (Metzger Reference Metzger, Kirwan, Dawney and Brigstocke2015; Rosengren Reference Rosengren, Edwards, Popartan and Pettersen2023). Ultimately, the question arises whether more-than-humans can articulate their needs and, if so, how and who listens to them. The case study will answer these questions, considering the three comparative dimensions of 1) representation, 2) creative expression, and 3) multispecies relations.

The protests outlined above took place against the backdrop of an acute environmental crisis in Vietnam and a crisis of representation. On 11 November 2013, the Vice Chairman of the Hanoi People’s Committee signed Decision No. 6816/QD-UNND, which called for the replacement of 6,708 trees in 190 streets across Ba Dinh, Hai Ba Trung, Cau Giay, and Thanh Xuan, the principal urban districts of Hanoi (Geertman and Boudreau Reference Geertman and Boudreau2018: 212). The project was part of a larger urban landscaping project with an overall budget of 3.4 million USD, initiated by the People’s Committee of Hanoi (Le Reference Le2015). The People’s Committee argued that many of the trees were old and sick and therefore posed a danger to the public. Moreover, and this was seen as the principal reason by the public, they posed an obstacle to infrastructure projects. Claiming that trees are a safety hazard or an obstacle to urban development in this way expresses an anthropocentric view of trees as “street furniture” (Rosengren Reference Rosengren, Edwards, Popartan and Pettersen2023: 273).

On 19 March 2015, the first 500 trees were cut down, along 9 major roads, many of them located near Thien Quang Lake and only one kilometre away from the historical city centre around Hoan Kiem Lake. Many urban residents first heard about the measures when they saw the trees being cut down, and were incensed by the lack of prior notification and by the failure to consult with citizens and experts. The felling of the first 500 trees provoked an urban protest, unprecedented in Vietnam, involving social groups of different ages and employing a wide repertoire of means of communication, resulting in creative expression both online and in physical urban space (Gillespie and Nguyen Reference Gillespie and Nguyen2019; Kurfürst Reference Kurfürst, Rachmawati, Pomeroy and Mookherjee2016; Vu Reference Vu2017).

Citizens’ protests were complemented by critical commentary by scholars and professionals. This has a longer tradition than street protests in socialist Vietnam, where citizens and protestors commonly draw on scientific evidence to legitimise claims vis-à-vis the government. By invoking scientific knowledge, people make their voices heard. In particular, this strategy has been used to draw attention to the problem of environmental pollution (Tran Reference Tran2017). On 23 March, less than a week after the first trees were cut down, a meeting attended by environmentalists, professionals, and academics criticised the municipal plan and pointed out that, according to the Capital Law regulating urban development in Hanoi, the Prime Minister needed to approve such a high-impact project (Minh Quyet Reference Minh2015). Architects shared their views with the public online, criticising the process adopted by the People’s Committee for selecting the trees to be cut down. Lawyers denounced the felling as an illegal act and published a manual for young people on how to engage in protests (Geertman and Boudreau Reference Geertman and Boudreau2018: 213). Professor Nguyen Tien Hiep, Director of the Viet Nam Centre for Plant Conservation, asked the authorities to establish a consultation group comprising scientists and experts to identify trees suitable for urban areas (Thu Huong Le Reference Le2015). At the time, the stated intention was to replace some of the old trees, many of which were planted during the French colonial period, with more suitable species like Manglietia fordiana, a tree native to China which grows up to 30 meters in height (Ho et al. Reference Ho, Petty and Laurence2015). BBC Tieng Viet (BBC in Vietnamese) organised a Google Hangout with National Assembly member Nguyen Minh Thuyet and activist Nguyen Lan Thang that went viral on YouTube. By 17 April, the clip “Cutting and replacing trees in Hanoi: all related questions” (“Chặt và thay cây ở Hà Nội: Những câu hỏi”) had already been viewed more than 37,000 times (Youtube 2015). Expert critics stressed the already low level of green space per capita in the city and that this would be further reduced by cutting down trees. Such criticisms express entrenched ideas about the natural environment serving the purpose of humans. By contrast, the trees’ agency became visible, audible, and tangible in citizens’ performative protests. This form of artivism highlighted citizens’ affective ties with the trees and vice versa. Citizens employed creative forms of expression to demonstrate their opposition to the cutting of trees.

Mostly organising in Facebook groups, citizens gathered for marches, picnics, communal chanting, and tree hugging. On the morning of 22 March, around 400 people assembled to march along the banks of Thien Quang Lake, followed by a tree-hug picnic attended by students, young families with small children, artists, and members of Hanoi’s LGBTQIA+ community (Geertman and Boudreau Reference Geertman and Boudreau2018: 227). During the picnic, people held up self-made, colourful signs, reading “tree hugs”, while shouting “Tôi yêu cây, cây yêu tôi” (I love trees, trees love me). In the Vietnamese language, which has no cases or conjugations, this play on words is easy to do simply by changing the word order of the sentence to swap the subject and object with each other. Such swapping expresses the dialectical tension between trees as static beings (objects) and continuous becoming (subject position), as outlined by Mathilda Rosengren (Reference Rosengren, Edwards, Popartan and Pettersen2023: 266). In the second part of the slogan, trees assume the subject position at the start of the sentence, verbally affirming their love of humans. Thus, the slogan “I love trees, and trees love me” signifies mutual affective relationships between humans and trees, while assigning subject positions to the trees.

Multispecies relations and the co-becoming of humans and trees surfaced in the metaphor used by biologist Nguyen Lan Dung at the expert meeting in Hanoi on 23 March, when he compared the trees to human hair, stating: “If the trees were human hair, and the hair fell out, our heads would be left bald” (Minh Quyet Reference Minh2015). This metaphor evokes the notion of the “intra-action”, whereby through their interweaving the bodies of plants and humans literally become one. The appreciation of trees as animate beings was expressed by citizens who attributed souls to trees, and by artists and poets who depicted trees as living creatures in their artworks (Hüwelmeier Reference Hüwelmeier, Duile, Großmann, Haug and Sprenger2023). In addition to the spoken word, other performative acts enacted embodied practices such as chanting, walking, and hugging. Affection between people, such as hugging each other, is usually not displayed in public in Vietnam. However, by employing hugging as a creative expression, protestors revealed the hidden sensory connections between trees and urbanites.

Protestors marched around the lake, wearing green shirts as well as green ribbons tied around their heads and wrists. They touched and hugged the trees, expressing their appreciation and affection for them. While most protests consisted of playful embodied practices, others mourned the trees’ deaths. Mourning and grieving are recognised as situated practices for coping with and acknowledging the loss of extinct species (Rigby Reference Rigby2015). In Hanoi, citizens cried when the first trees were felled in order to prevent others from being cut down (Minh Quyet Reference Minh2015). In addition, citizens held a commemoration ceremony for the felled trees and assigned personhood to the trees by casting them as grandparents (Hüwelmeier Reference Hüwelmeier, Duile, Großmann, Haug and Sprenger2023: 177). Like ancestors, who are worshipped in Vietnam, the trees become kin that need to be taken care of and mourned for. Imagining the trees as ancestors relates the multispecies entanglements of the protests back to the founding myth of Âu Cơ. The Viet are the offspring of the mountain fairy and the water dragon. The connection between soil and kin is also evoked by the Vietnamese saying “ăn quả nhớ kẻ trồng cây” (when eating the fruit of a tree, remember who planted it). It stresses the relevance of nourishing kinship ties, while traditions of filial piety teach children that they are responsible for their parents and need to care for them when they are old. In accordance with this tradition, protestors formed human chains around the trees. By using their hands and bodies to prevent them from being cut down, protestors became custodians of the trees. Subsequently, the performative and embodied acts of mourning and hugging hinted at what Country et al. (Reference Country2016: 470) refer to as a “co-emergent world based on intimate human-more-than-human relationships of responsibility and care”. Interestingly, in this mutual nurturing of other species – or, put differently, at this intraface – gender dynamics were at play. The affective and embodied practice of caring took place in the wider context of Vietnamese culture, where women are cast as carers and providers for the family (Nguyen Reference Nguyen2015). While people from different genders and with different sexual orientations contributed to the movement, the initiators of the Facebook groups were mostly women, among them young mothers.

Urbanites tackled the problem of the missing representation of more-than-humans in the city by assigning personhood to trees. Trees were able to speak as protestors switched their subject position with the trees’. The trees acquired, moreover, the status of kin as they were cast as ancestors in the form of grandparents, who need to be nourished and cared for (even after death). The authoritarian regime in Vietnam usually undermines political opposition and, thence, all forms of public protest. However, artivism allowed for cloaking protests as weekend routines, e.g., gathering, and picnicking under trees, walking along the sea banks, etc. However, the performance became part of the artivism as people chanted, dressed as trees, touched, and hugged the trees. Finally, the performativity of environmental protests allowed citizens, together with more-than-humans, to imagine, and for a moment, perform alternative ways of being and becoming-with in the city centre of Hanoi.

Feminist Performance in Technoenvironments: Who Speaks for Whom and Who Listens to Whom?

Read through a feminist political ecology lens, we compare the performativity of Indonesian and Vietnamese environmental protectors along the dimensions of representation, the creative expression involved, and the evolving multispecies entanglements. In Indonesia as well as in Vietnam, living matter such as plants, seeds, and soil become agents in meaning-making about people’s relations to their environment and in how they are represented and mediated in specific technoenvironments. Through co-becoming, they ascribe personhood to trees and pak choi, which goes beyond simple respect for them as living creatures. The ways people listen to them, interact with them in the city, or ascribe positions to flora in the mandala turn plants into actants in their own right. Pak choi and alley trees fence, protect, and order the fields and the streets, becoming active agents in forming landscapes to accommodate humans. They cohabit the space for growing food in rural settings and provide shelter from the sun and rain in cities. In the mandalas, pak choi emerges as a vital actor in contrast to the dormant seeds, its seedlings becoming miniature trees in the cosmologies of the mandalas, which are symbolic representations of the whole world. Even the yin-yang symbol, a highly abstract conceptualisation of bipolar harmony, is grounded in the muddy environment of soil. Soil itself, while seemingly passive, is an active medium that inspires agriculture through its cultivation and carries seeds, trees, and humans. In Vietnam, belonging is rooted in coming from the same soil, and through mutual care, both social and environmental relationships are maintained.

Existing hierarchical structures within society are represented in the creative expression in protest and the performative workshop. Acts of interpretation and meaning-making clearly bear intersectional markers such as gender and class. In Indonesia, a mandala pattern is viewed by women as curing and, within a care relationship, while for the men it represents an abstract notion of diversity in unity. Class patterns appear when farmers create a mandala in the form of a miniature garden, sowing and trusting in the benevolent conditions for life on earth, academics retreat to a habitus favouring abstract symbolism, and political activists embrace the contradictory messiness of living in ruins (Stoler Reference Stoler2008). In Vietnam, mostly members of the urban middle class engage in the protests. Love and mutual care are, for a great part, organised and conducted by women, and queer people, who express their concerns of mutual care by nurturing and mourning the felled trees.

Human bodies and plants perform together in a multispecies setting. In Hanoi, embodied protest occurs when people march, stand, chant, and eat their picnics. Moreover, Hanoians speak with and listen to trees, hug them, and refer to them as ancestors having a soul. Creating a mandala “crouching, like a child” gives rise to equally embodied sensations. The playful atmosphere of sitting on the ground and chatting creates intimacy and relaxation. Other participants compare the meditation that accompanies assembling the mandala to “a prayer in my heart”, referring to an organ that is hypersensitive to affects. The three-dimensionality of bodies and plants merges in the shared need for water, food, shelter, and the sociality of humans and more-than-humans.

Driven by environmental concerns, Indonesians as well as Vietnamese experience their involvement through bodily sensations. They creatively express their concern in the intimacy of involving their children or revoking sensual experiences of childhood. By taking their children along to hold picnics close to the trees, and mourning for lost trees, Hanoi citizens evoke the future of their city and the sensitivity of children to their surroundings. Participants in the workshop in Indonesia are reminded of their foundational years, crouching on the floor for the art performance, deeply immersed in the game-like act of creation, making and unmaking rules for mandala design as they go. Just as this evokes memories of childhood, when magic thinking and animism dominate the perception of the world, the presence of children in the protests in Hanoi underlines the possibilities of different perceptions of the city. Just as children thrive on the love and care of their parents, humans rely on multispecies entanglements and the “love” of trees. Urbanites were not motivated to engage in environmental protest by opposition to the government, but by love for the trees.

Finally, multispecies entanglements evolved as bodily and sensory experiences. Tree hugging enacts the sensory aspects of care and protection (Puig de la Bellacasa Reference Puig de la Bellacasa2017). Just as skin contact and touch are essential for children to prosper and support mutual bonding, hugging trees connects urban dwellers to the soil beneath them, reaffirming mutual affective relations in which trees are both objects and subjects. Memories of a similarly entangled relationship surface in the mandala pattern of the batik tambal, resembling a patchwork blanket used to cure the sick by covering them, like the earth’s blanket (Turner Reference Turner2008). Healing is achieved by rest: doing nothing, allowing time to pass. A blanket crafted out of dormant seeds invokes the need to heal the earth through alternative agricultural practices and the material entanglement of humans within the landscape. Co-becoming with the mountains and the sea offers new ways to read and feel the embodied situatedness in technoenvironments of humans and non-humans alike.

In both cases, the relationship to technoenvironments is mediated by means of communication, thereby achieving representation through creative expression. However, in Hanoi, the asymmetrical relationship between trees, as objects that require human protection, and urbanites as active subjects is maintained. Although the protests were successful in ending the tree felling, they ultimately did not result in a paradigm shift with regard to the recognition of trees as legal persons. Still, the trees’ needs are articulated by humans attuned to the plants. They do so through their performative acts during protests and by sharing updates and legal advice on social media.

In Vietnam, social media is central to organising knowledge exchange, spreading news, and building the momentum to take the shock and concern over the felling of the trees onto the streets. The online and offline worlds meet on the streets where the trees were cut down, where energy built up online is unleashed in a multitude of performative protests. Picnics, marching along the streets, hugging the trees, and dressing in green, all unfold from a seemingly mundane repertoire of socialising, occupying space, affectionate touch, and symbolic dress code. In Indonesia, the artwork “Memories of Nature” serves as a medium for expressing the imaginaries of the organic community by making mandalas composed of temporary assemblages of everyday objects. The participants rebuild the world – comprised of Mount Meru and the world ocean - on a table, unearthing personal notions and the cultural memory of nature in their minds and expressing them in a collective effort. These representations of technoenvironments build multispecies cosmologies, citing the mythical origins of human society in Southeast Asia through the union of mountains and the sea

Indonesians and Vietnamese move between the mountain and the sea, engaging in performative representation of their entanglements with more-than-humans. Hanoi protestors gathered at Thien Quang Lake. By marching along the lake banks, residents of Hanoi invoke the walk as a pilgrimage (đi hành hương), moving between the Tan Vien Mountain, the mountain range close to Hanoi, and the Eastern Sea. Similarly, the Indonesians, by creating a mandala consisting of a circle set in a square, representing time and space, perform a walk in their minds that is reminiscent of pradakshina, the circumambulation of the holy mountain Meru, whose summit is the prototypical home of the gods across Southeast Asia. Likewise, Vietnamese enact the sacred relationship between mountain and sea, or wind and water, as manifest in phong thủy, acknowledging its sacredness when taking to the street in order to protest and protect.

In conclusion, Vietnamese and Indonesian actors draw on a broad cultural repertoire to express their sentiments and concerns about the endangered environment. They eloquently use different registers of symbolic and bodily expressions to perform their relationship with more-than-humans, such as seedlings and trees. Mountains and soil are equally important in the repertoire, evoking relations between humans and the earth they inhabit. While Indonesia belongs to the Indosphere of Southeast Asia, northern Vietnam is part of the Sinosphere. Both share a legacy of symbolism, derived from the syncretism of Buddhist and Hindu with animist worldviews, which are enacted and performed to connect to more-than-humans.

With these comparative cases, we contribute to the emerging scholarship on technoenvironments to understand the evolving networks that bind human and more-than-human beings together, shaped by culturally and intersectional performances of agency, care, and resistance. Drawing on the notion of plural ecologies, we acknowledge that such networks of entities are inherently plural, including or excluding entities, while assigning different values and agencies to beings. We thus argue that a reconfiguration of more-than-human relationships allows us to hear plants express their agency as actants within an assemblage through performance and protest. The performative representations of people’s entanglements with their more-than-human environment open new ways to listening to the contested and embodied discourses over technoenvironments. In this, gender, age, and class shape the possibilities of silently speaking, and being able to listen in a situation of political control and under the hegemony of an instrumentalistic perception of nature. Thus, we propose an ecofeminist perspective on multispecies relations in technoenvironemnts in Southeast Asia.

We propose the concept of technoenvironments to address the entanglements among the manifold sociopolitical, ecological, and economic transformations that have been taking place in Southeast Asia, initiated through capitalist development. While technological progress was welcomed to eradicate hunger and poverty in the form of the Green Revolution, and the planning of cities, people became more and more aware of the devastating effects of the implementation of planning measures that seek technological solutions to social and ecological problems. Against this background, the discussed case studies present alternative ways of being and living together of farmers and urbanites with pak choi, soil, and trees, drawing on diverse knowledges (embodied, sensory, scientific), and ontologies (religious, animist) to make sense of the crisis-ridden worlds they inhabit.We conclude by regarding the performativity of protest and arts-based workshops as attempts to extend the public sphere through creative expression beyond speaking and acting humans, to include multispecies actors. Only if we overcome human-centric approaches to urban planning and agriculture can we create and maintain liveable urban and rural spaces.