Project by Shahnaj Sharmin Rimu @sharminrimu
Think: you are in a village in Hualien, Formosa, Taiwan. Around you, the entire community is built from sugarcane, bagasse walls, bundled leaves, even small robots grown from its fibers. From the roofs, ropes and wires of sugar hang. Along these suspended lines, cars, seeds, vegetation, water, and daily necessities move between households. This, of course, is pure fiction. But could it have been otherwise? What might have emerged if the Formosan Amis community had never been subjected to Dutch, Spanish, or Japanese colonization? If land, materials, and knowledge systems had remained in their own hands? There is a saying in Taiwan that not both ends of sugarcane are sweet. This project challenges that unevenness. It imagines an alternate world where monoculture is reworked beyond extraction, and where the community refuses the narrative of colonization.“
