Plantation Talks

Plantation Talks: A Roundtable with Voyaging Vapors Working Group and Guest Speakers at NUS Museum

What are the environmental, architectural and material legacies of plantation landscapes? In this session of the Plantation Talks series, an interdisciplinary group of artists, historians, architects and anthropologists will engage in a roundtable discussion and share their research on the plantation as conceptual model and practical method for understanding resource extraction in changing landscapes.

Image: Entreprice, Headquarter of the Dutch Troops in the beginning of the Battak War.” in: Views from Deli and the Battak Country by K. Feilberg, 1870.

Plantation Talks series is part of an ongoing collaboration between NUS Museum and the Voyaging Vapors research group, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and hosted at the Università della Svizzera italiana.

Speakers include artist ila, Faizah Zakaria (Southeast Asian Studies and Malay Studies, NUS), Anthony David Medrano (Environmental Studies, Yale-NUS College and History, NUS), and Robin Hartanto Honggare (Architecture, NUS), along with members of the Voyaging Vapors Team, Siddharta Perez (NUS Museum, Museum Curatorial Lead), Will Davis (ISUP/ISA, Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio and SNSF Ambizione Group Leader) and Pina Haas (PhD Candidate ISUP/ISA, Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio).

Speaker Bios:

Robin Hartanto Honggare

Robin is a historian and curator working at the intersection of architecture, environmental humanities, and commodity histories. His current project investigates the extensive network of buildings that enabled commodity production in the Dutch East Indies. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore. Robin’s research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American-Indonesian Cultural & Educational Foundation, and Nieuwe Instituut, where he was also involved in the Collecting Otherwise working group. He is also part of Museum Arsitektur Indonesia’s board of curators.

Anthony Medrano

Anthony D. Medrano is the Presidential Young Professor of environmental studies at Yale-NUS College, and an assistant professor of history at the National University of Singapore. He’s the editor of Lala-Land: Singapore’s Seafood Heritage (2024) and co-editor of Wild Life: Stories of Singapore Biodiversity (2025).

Faizah Zakaria

Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor jointly appointed at the Departments of Southeast Asian Studies and Malay Studies in the National University of Singapore. Her research interests centre on religion and ecology, environmental justice and indigenous movements in island Southeast Asia; themes that she addressed in her first monograph The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023).

ila

Unfolding through visual, narrative, and performance, ila’s artistic practice revolves around ecosystems and renewal of kinship and affinities. Negotiating alternative nodes of storytelling, her works reconfigure and merge speculative fiction with factual histories, informal archives and collective experiences, conceiving them as sites for empathy and connectivity.

Dr. Will Davis

Dr. Will Davis is an architectural historian broadly interested in plant-human interaction. Recent research has considered histories of agribusiness, resettlement, resistance, and the plantation system through the material records of architecture and land.

Pina Haas

Pina Kalina Haas (she/her) is an interdisciplinary researcher with a BA in Political Sciences and Literature from the Liberal Arts and Sciences University College Utrecht (2020) and a master's in "Changing Societies: Migration – Resources – Conflicts" from the University of Basel (2024). Currently, as a PhD candidate under Prof. Dr. Sascha Roesler, she continues to pursue these research interests in her collaboration with Dr. Will Davis in the SNF-funded Ambizione project Voyaging Vapors: Plant Histories of Plantation Architectures.

Siddharta Perez

Siddharta Perez is a senior curator at NUS Museum. Her curatorial perspective steers multiple sources from regional histories and contemporary creative practices.