Tropical Lab is an annual international art camp organised by LASALLE College of the Arts for master’s degree and PhD candidates. Led by Senior Fellow Professor Milenko Prvački over two weeks, students from international arts schools and institutions undertake workshops and seminars in Singapore exploring various aspects of history, geography, culture and aesthetics.

Theme: Terra

An open space, Terra invites critical reflection on the lived environment as well as the contested terrains of territory, belonging and resource distribution-not neutral, but a negotiated terrain framed by archaeologists of geopolitics.

It speaks to histories and the presence of cultivation, colonisation, extraction and habitation, while pointing to emergent futures of sustainability, stewardship and survival. With the world captivated by artificial and computational presence, terra emerges as a pivotal terra synthetic realm of data and machine intelligence, shaping our perception of the world.

Terra refers to the earth as firm ground (terra firma), to fragility and fired craft (terra cotta), and to the planetary and terrestrial as domains of human and non-human life. Drawn to its fractured fragilities, artists and thinkers who have engaged with terra as material and idea-Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970), Joseph Beuys's 7000 Oaks (1982), Khvay Samnang's Where is My Land? (2014), Tang Da-Wu's She Asked the Forest for a Moment of Stillness (2023)—underscore terra as both material and metaphor for cultural, ecological, metaphysical and social negotiations.

Theoretically, the concept of terra has come under tremendous scrutiny, and scholars such as Bruno Latour (2018) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021) have drawn attention to questions of development, ecology and epistemic justice.
Across these perspectives, terra emerges as base, system and allegory in flux. It is the firm ground on which we stand to describe who we are. Or can we?

Participating institutions
Annanya Dhanda-Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda
Cameron McGaff-University of Washington
Febri Anugerah-Universitas Gadjah Mada
Flavia Carolina D'Alessandro—University of the Arts London
loannis Polychronopoulos—Musashino Art University
Ivanja Todorovic-University of Arts in Belgrade
Jiayi Liu-RMIT University
Kotoko Takasu-Nagoya University of Arts and Sciences
Laramp-Zurich University of the Arts
Lucie Planty-École supérieure d'arts & médias de Caen/Cherbourg, France
Lulu Smith-University of California, Davis
Mai Muecke-National Art School, Sydney
Miruna Morte University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca
Muzi Gigaba -Nelson Mandela University
Nemanja Ladjic— University of Arts in Belgrade
Sophia von Ballmoos-Zurich University of the Arts
Teck Lim-LASALLE College of the Arts
Vinson Phua-LASALLE College of the Arts
Yanqi He-California Institute of the Arts
Yeonkyeong Park-Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Yoshihito Ogata-Nagoya University of Arts and Sciences
Youkyoung Cho-Columbia University

Curator
Helen O'Toole