Pages from Terra Nullius: A Bibliography of Lava

Terra Nullius*: A Bibliography of Lava brings the field into the Asia Art Archive and draws an allegorical parallel between the materiality of lava and the formation of the archive. Together with the staff at AAA-A, the duo explores how borders within and around Asia are permeated and how the fabrics of contemporaneity are stretched. The artists not only relate the archive’s precarity to their diasporic experience and its elasticity to the entanglement between the contemporary and the deep time; they also find these characters resemble those of lava. Through lava’s physical presence and its generative nature which traverse territories and reorganize the geosphere, the project engages in the rethinking of the archive as an entity that is becoming increasingly porous and viscous.

*“Terra Nullius” is Latin and translates to “no one’s land.”