This exhibition is the third iteration of the South by Southeast project that seeks to widen the geopoetic contexts of Southeast Asia in relation to articulations of the south, the east, and the southeast elsewhere as a third moment. This third moment may elude the construction of colonial geopolitics and, in fact, responds to the other forms of worlding the region of the southeast, which need not be reduced to the legible formulation of Southeast Asia. In this current exhibition, the southeast is made to incline to the South Pacific. The previous initiatives situated this region within the ambit of Southeast Europe, South Africa, and the Caribbean.
The title responds to the Austronesian concept of origin and path, from the word pun, which is both locus and initiator of continuity. It can be roughly translated as stem. In the life of the forest, stemflow refers to the water from the rain that moves down the stem or trunk to reach the ground. The image intuits passage, transmission, and an all-over ecology of past and future.
Finally, the exhibition speaks to the evolving scenarios in the world in the present, such as the wars in Europe and the tension in the seas around the region. By redrawing the map and remapping the world through the vector of the southeast, the project seeks to offer imaginations of belonging that stems from multiple wellsprings of origin, emergence, and assembly.