SOME LIKE IT COOLER: HEAT AS COLONIAL REPAIR
via PARSE JOURNAL
As part of the PARSE “Some Like It Hot” Biennial Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden (November 12 - 14, 2025) Wen Di Sia and littoral zone[s] (Yaw Atoubi and Esé Emmanuel) were in dialogue on the topic of colonial heat and rituals of repair.
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Wen Di Sia is engaged in an ongoing body of work titled ‘A Cosmology of Care’ which looks at the hill paddy practice of The Semai, one of 19 culturally and linguistically distinct Orang Asli (indigenous) groups in Peninsular Malaysia. The work is exploring how the Semai of Ulu Jelai continue to practice ancestral hill paddy cultivation as an act of “reterritorialising” their ancestral spaces despite ongoing systemic oppression by the State. To the Semai, fire cools—not the chemical process, but the ritual act that follows.
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littoral zone[s] place their attention with the West African Atlantic coast. Considering the troubled and wounded relations generated through colonialism and slavery, they enlist the movements in water bodies, and their heat currents, as a metonymy of repair. Their work imagines kinship as a force cognisant of the enduring heat of colonialism and racism across the Black world. They reintroduce the redistributive motion of heat currents as a metonymy of the potentials of diversion and return, a circulatory process in no way antagonistic to other forms of relations. They take the tidal currents as a relational methodology, absorbing the heat released by our kin so that it may be dispersed and returned without harm.
The dialogue was facilitated by Onkar Kular and Cathryn Klasto.
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Wen Di Sia is a writer and researcher with particular focus on indigenous knowledge, cosmologies and eco-critical thoughts. In 2018 she initiated GERIMIS, a collaborative artistic and archiving collective that co-produces artworks and cultural content with indigenous Malaysian (Orang Asli OA) contemporary artists, artisans, and communities.
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littoral zone[s] is a collaborative archival, artistic research and pedagogy project. Informed by alternative writing and thinking practices, it anticipates, challenges and animates the notion of the coast—both as a geographic/ecological space and an ideological framework—to open up discourses of intimacy, relationality, aesthetic responsibility, and power. It is initiated by Yaw Atoubi, a writer and culture worker based in Accra and Esé Emmanuel, a writer, artist and curator based between Iowa City, Lagos and Accra.