28 June 2026, 11:00–12:30 / Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Lange Nieuwstraat 7, 3512 PA Utrecht
Part of the Summer Market: Land-ing in Relation day program
Join us for the book launch of Walking_The Vacuum Landscape, published by Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons. It is the outcome of a long-term artistic research project by Lo Yuen Ming and Chun Yao Lin, with contributions from Anitha Silvia, and edited by Yee Ting Lau.
Presented in the form of a workshop, we collectively identify landscape images, un-framing and unboxing archives as a decolonial act. We expand on classification as a spatialized practice at the Casco Library, in conversation with Yee Ting. This is followed by a discussion on the disparity between personal and collective narratives, echoing the themes of the book.
Walking_The Vacuum Landscape investigates the construction of landscape not as a neutral geographical territory, but as a visual and epistemological system historically engineered by official archives, Western painting, and photography. This book wades into the fog of the present post-colonial landscape to exhume the missing roots buried in the (not-yet-shared) land, addressing the archival silences alongside the ongoing realities of displacement obscured by post-colonialism.
The research is divided into two primary geographical and conceptual inquiries. The first part of the book navigates the plantation landscapes of East Java, unfolding as a fictionalized self-reflection grounded in decolonial thought. The second part shifts to the urban terrain of Surabaya, documenting the city through contemporary walking practices as a feminist spatial methodology to navigate and reclaim areas dominated by remaining Dutch colonial architecture.
Moving alongside these texts, the landscape is presented photographically. By interweaving recent fieldwork photography with Dutch archives, the visual narrative traces the fractures in colonial terrain and confronts its archival silences. At its core, this book is a collective act of building inter-Asia solidarity for land-rights justice and social movements—a solidarity as fragile as moss, yet impossible to extinguish.
