Tracing Identity Through Living Archives

This discussion reflects on how human movements such as migration, displacement, and travel are shaping memory, identity, and relationships to place. Land is approached not only as physical territory, but as a cultural and historical space shaped by ancestral ties, colonial histories, and ongoing ecological change. Plants and food act as living archives: they travel with people, adapt to new environments, and carry embodied knowledge of home, survival, and care.

Bringing together perspectives from different geographies, Nelden Djakababa Gericke, Ngurah Suryawan, and Minh Duc Pham will share reflections drawn from artistic practice, research, and lived experience. Their conversations will touch on how memories of land, plants, and food reveal layered histories of migration, colonial encounters, environmental transformation, and cultural resilience.

Situated in Bali, a place shaped by centuries of movement, ritual exchange, agriculture, and contemporary tourism, the discussion invites audiences to think about how local knowledge systems and everyday practices such as farming, cooking, and foraging speak to global questions of belonging, distance, and care. Moderated by Gatari Surya Kusuma, the session opens space for dialogue on how remembering through land and food can become a way of reconnecting across borders and histories.