Unknown Territories is a three-year artistic initiative that embarks on spiritual and geographical journeys across forests in 2025, seas in 2026, and archipelagos in 2027. It centers on the concept of geographic exploration as a pathway to uncover hidden cultural terrains, from forgotten histories and Indigenous knowledge to practices, rituals and memories entangled with nature.

Can modern humanity still explore the marvelous and the uncanny? Unknown Territories imagines landscapes as repositories of hidden knowledge and diverse cultures, reviving Indigenous cultural practices and reconnecting with nature through reflections on forests, seas, and archipelagos. The initiative challenges colonial perspectives shaped by extractivist capitalism and opens new interpretations of interconnected relationships with plants, animals, sea dwellers, minerals and other more-than-humans. It envisions alternative futures where miscellaneous cultures and bio- and geo-diversity can coexist.

During the premodern and modern eras, Western imperialists explored vast unknown lands, transforming them into conquered and measured territories. They relegated Indigenous knowledge, beliefs, and rituals to the realms of the "occult," "myth," or "fantasy," inferior to the Western scientific order, pretending to be "rationalist" and "universal". Colonialists, under a mandate to "civilize," framed nature as a wild, untamed resource to be controlled, extracted, and commodified for capitalist gain. This worldview undermined the value of local cultural practices that upheld relationships with diverse ecosystems, framing them as “exotic” or “savage”. 

These cultural, historical, and spiritual trajectories have contributed to contemporary ecological issues: contamination, ravage of local territories, habitat destruction, displaced communities, species extinction, and social injustices tied to exploitation and systemic racism, all of which have disproportionately affected Indigenous communities. Unknown Territories intertwine Indigenous knowledge with a critique of capitalist exploitation, fostering a deeper awareness of conservation, cultural revival, and human-nature relationships.

Each year, the initiative unfolds as a transcultural and multidisciplinary festival featuring audiovisual performances, site-specific artworks, concerts, film screenings, lectures, and exhibitions. Produced in collaboration with local and translocal cultural practitioners, the festival invites audiences to critically examine environmental degradation and extractivism, while nurturing sustainable imaginaries rooted in mutuality, resistance, and resilience.

Forests have long been vital ecosystems, sustaining diverse species and providing shelter, sustenance, and spiritual significance for human communities. Across time and geographies, they have been central to myths and legends, often depicted as liminal spaces inhabited by spirits and supernatural beings. These stories reflect an ancient understanding of forests as places where ecological and cultural memories intertwine. However, the forces of imperialist expansion and extractivist capitalism have sought to suppress this other knowledge, reducing forests to mere commodities to be exploited for economic gain, erasing both biodiversity and the ancestral knowledge.

The relentless expansion of capitalist urbanization, industrial agriculture, mining, and logging has devastated forest landscapes, systematically displacing both human and more-than-human inhabitants. As forests are cleared for development, their vital role in ecological balance—regulating climate, sustaining biodiversity, and fostering interspecies relationships—is threatened. Unknown Territories: Forests resists these dominant forces of extraction and exploitation, embracing the forest as a site of coexistence, reciprocity, and resilience. It challenges the mechanistic and utilitarian view of forests as resources, reorienting them as dynamic, living spaces.

Forests transcend linear histories, existing as both material spaces and metaphysical terrains. In Indigenous and mythological cosmologies, forests are entangled with ancestral spirits, non-human agencies, and ecological balances that blur the boundaries between the visible and invisible, the past and the future. Whether inhabited by ancestral spirits or acting as agents in the balance of ecosystems, forests challenge conventional boundaries and offer alternative epistemologies rooted in relationality, deep time, and shared memory. At a time of ecological precarity, the Unknown Territories: Forest becomes a site for mourning and radical imagination, offering a pathway toward survival and the reclamation of planetary futures.

Artistic Director    
Soko Hwang