To tribalizethe landscape

 

This work extends from my earlier work “Seventh Tribe”. It examines the process through which myhometown landscape has been replaced and intervened by large-scale solar panel farm.As these massive energy infrastructures reshape the land, I ask whether it is possible to translatethem into a cultural language that I can understand and no longer feel a sense of alienation.

 

For this reason, I began reconstructing solar panels using traditional materials and Paiwanelements—wood, fabric, rope, and beads. Through handcraft, these materials carry the body, stories,family, and memory, forming a vocabulary that remains connected to the land.

 

Through these warm, handmade textures, I attempt a form of “tribalized landscape translation”:absorbing industrial, capital-driven, monumental, and cold technological objects into a culturalsystem that is familiar to me, where they are deconstructed, reinterpreted, and given new meaning.

 

For me, this process becomes a reverse cultural interpretation: these structures enter and occupy theland, and I absorb them back through local and traditional languages, renaming and rewriting themin new ways. When mainstream energy industries reshape land through technology and capital, Irespond by returning these structures to a tactile, human, and comprehensible scale throughhandcraft. This process closely overlaps with the histories of many marginalized Indigenous andminority communities. Under colonial and assimilation pressures, knowledge, myths, and languagesgradually disappear, merge, or fragment. Therefore, my work does not only respond to energyinfrastructure, but also to how culture itself dissolves, changes, and becomes incomplete under thepressures of time.

 

Ultimately, I transform solar panels into new objects, placing marginalized and rewritten landscapeswithin the same space, revealing the estrangement and unfamiliar forms that emerge throughdissolution and alienation. These objects exist between cultural fragments, residual memory,and the formation of new identities.