SESSION: Jungle Ruins and Sacred Forests: Ecologies of the Forgotten Monument
This session investigates the convergence of landscape, mythology, and sacred geography in the formation, decay, and transformation of ruins within forested or overgrown environments globally, exploring how ecological processes: vegetal, animal, and elemental: reclaim, reconfigure, or sacralise ruins— drawing conceptual inspiration from South and Southeast Asian sites.
We primarily ask: How do non-human agents, local deities, or forest-dwelling communities shape the preservation or dissolution of these sites? Moving beyond conservationist frameworks, the session looks at ruins’ ontological and temporal transformations within ecological temporalities, interrogating their shifting cultural and material significance.
From photographic renderings of Mesoamerican ruins in Mexican modernism; and ancestral spirit-shrines in the forests of northeastern Thailand: interpreted as a ‘museum’ where the guardian spirits are read as curators, to open-ended artistic engagements with coastal ecologies in the off-shore mangrove islands in Singapore, and popular film adaptations of indigenous folktales, the papers probe the agency of non-human actors, where: jungles are “intricate vegetal embroidery,” whispering mangroves can be heard through deep listening, djinns haunt neglected Sufi graves in western India, and heterotopic jungles resurface in cinematic horror. Through frameworks of care, cyclical temporalities, and plural cartographies, we trace the relationship between materiality and environment in the ontological transformations of such sites through reimagining cultural signification and inheritance.
Session Convenors:
Archishman Sarker, Ashoka University, India
Session Speakers:
Alisa Santikarn, University of Vienna
Rotten Wood, Concrete Shrine, Sacred Forest: Preserving the Boo Da Spirit in Northeast Thailand
The Saan Boo Da (ศาลปู่ตา) or Don Boo Da (ดอนปู่ตา) is a shrine in Northeast Thailand dedicated to the ‘grandfather spirit’ (Boo Da) – an ancestral deity who protects local villages. Each shrine has a dedicated guardian, known as a Jum, who cares for the shrine space and serves as a messenger of the Boo Da spirit. One of the traditional rules of the Saan Boo Da is the maintenance of the forest around the shrine, with cutting trees and hunting animals forbidden. My talk is based on visits to thirteen shrines across four provinces in Thailand, interviews with their caretakers, and participation in an annual cleansing ritual in April 2025. Through these examples, I unpack the logics underlying the curated decay (or ruination) of older wooden shrines placed alongside replacement concrete structures, where these wooden monuments may be forgotten, but belief is preserved, as well as spaces where the forest has been conserved versus razed. In doing so, I take the Boo Da shrine as a case study to understand the complex interplay among environment, spirit, and materiality, through a framework of care. I present the shrine as an analogy for a museum and the Jum as curator and conservator – responsible for both material and immaterial care. I further analyse the role of the Jum and the Boo Da spirit in negotiating priorities in this process of care, which involves forest, animals, ancestors, material offerings and structures, alongside the communities themselves, across time.
Daisy Silver, University College London and California State University, Northridge
An Intricate Vegetal Embroidery’: Armando Salas Portugal and Modern Mexican Ruins
Armando Salas Portugal’s photographs of mid-century architecture were central to the visual construction of Mexican modernism for international audiences. Best known for his photographs of modernist architect Luis Barragán’s houses, he also produced an expansive body of work depicting Mesoamerican ruins, volcanic terrain and dense jungle.
This paper reconsiders Salas Portugal’s architectural photographs through the lens of these earlier landscape and archaeological expeditions, situating his practice within post-revolutionary debates on land, memory and cultural inheritance. His photographs of Bonampak, enveloped by vines, and of Parícutin’s engulfed towns position nature as an active agent. At Bonampak, he described the encroaching jungle as an ‘intricate vegetal embroidery’. Rather than monumentalising ancient structures or modernist buildings, he attends to vegetal time, geological process and ruination as cyclical rather than terminal. This temporal sensibility reappears in his later photographs of Barragán’s El Pedregal, where lava fields and creeping vines seem to reclaim, and even pre-author, the modernist house.
Salas Portugal’s photographs register to a longer history of invention and imagination in visual representations of the Mexican landscape. Following the Revolution, Mesoamerican ruins became vital sources for re-articulating national identity, as they signalled autonomy before colonialism and offered an ‘authentic’ cultural past and a strategy for decolonisation. Considering this history, this paper argues that Salas Portugal’s photographs reveal how ecological processes and deep temporalities shaped the imaginative construction of Mexican modernism.
Joella Kiu, Singapore Art Museum (SAM)
Brackish Shrubbery: Deep Listening in the Mangroves
Over the past year, the Singapore-based artist ila has been working on her long-term project, Instrumental Plot. As a multi-disciplinary artist, ila’s works are marked by a sensitive attunement to the environments they portray, and are characterised by an interest in multiple temporalities, alternative cartographies and plural beings. Her project Instrumental Plot is named after a series of maps drawn up in 1970 documenting mainland Singapore and its offshore islands. In them, mangroves feature prominently. Mangroves are typically found in tropical climates: hardy plants that cling steadily to the coastline, propped up by a system of aerial roots. ila’s project aims to trace instrumental shifts in these environments both through the archives and in the present day as mangroves are at risk of excised from the land in the pursuit of urban redevelopment or land reclamation. By working closely with ila under the auspices of a curatorial project titled Lost & Found: Rings, the artist and I embarked on months of research together: combing through the archives, getting lost in the mangroves, and speaking to coastal ecologists. This paper will examine the works the artist has made since the project began, delve into the weeds of working with an artist in an open-ended manner, and discuss the importance of listening deeply to the mangroves as they whisper to us. It posits a working process that reifies and respects the environment’s agency above an output-driven mindset – asserting that work takes time to arrive and that certain conditions are necessary for such endeavours
Soumya Vats, Ashoka University
From Abandonment to Popular(ity): Jungles and Ruins in Maddock Horror Film
This paper contends with the cinematic portrayal of heterotopias employed to elicit socially- palatable horror within the Maddock Horror Comedy Universe. Resisting homogenisation into neoliberal landscapes, these filmic sites offer a return to the reimagined indigenous past to evoke humour, fear and affect in the audiences. Focusing on Stree (2018), Bhediya (2022), and Munjya (2024), it analyses the spatial representation of ruins and forests as repositories of marginalised oral histories endangered by neoliberal modernity. The paper looks at the film techniques used alongside historicisation to map both synchronic elements of individual films, and the diachronic themes they represent within Hindi popular culture.
Drawing on Pierre Nora’s notion of “lieux de mémoire”, it reads the cinematic spaces:, forgotten ecologies, threatened forests, and decrepit havelis (mansions) as resurfacing sites of collective memory. Building on Meraj Ahmed Mubarki and Meheli Sen’s extensive accounts of Horror cinema’s evolution alongside sociopolitical shifts in the country, this paper positions the recent representation of abandoned cultural spaces as both an introduction to and adaptation of existing folktales for the neoliberal audience. Contrasted with Bishnupriya Ghosh’s earlier “High-Rise Horror”, Maddock’s “return” to historical ruins’ persisting impact on surrounding modernity reconciles the oft-conflicting demands of culturally grounding their narratives while retaining globalised aesthetics.
Through a cinematic exploration of regional folktales, the past folds into the present, warranting a relook at how popular culture re-conceptualises history. The paper reads the depiction of these heterotopic sites as a negotiation between suppressed vignettes of a cultural past and the commercial medium’s dominant lens on them.
Narmeen Sajid, Independent Researcher
Sacred Ecologies and the Horror of Neglect: Urbanisation and the Afterlives of Sufi Shrines in Khuldabad
This paper interrogates non-human temporalities and the sacralisation of Khuldabad in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (formerly Aurangabad district of Maharashtra), Western India, within the context of urbanisation and state neglect. Khuldabad, also known as the “Valley of Saints,” is said to contain the graves of 1,500 Sufi saints of the Chishti order, who settled the town in the fourteenth century. Focusing on the Sufi-Sant traditions of the Deccan region, this paper explores enduring syncretic practices through case studies rooted in narratives of mysticism that feature djinns haunting the shrines. This mysticism, however, often masks the deliberate erasure of identity and language.
The paper argues that the monuments are not inert ruins but living symbols of resilience, where physical decay symbolises transitions in social and cultural identities. The afterlives of the sites extend beyond their physical structures, through the re-contextualisation of their relationships to the sacred and the profane. Employing visual descriptive analysis, and drawing from studies in the sociology of hauntings, hauntology and the politics of ruins-ruination, this research posits that abandonment of a monument is not an endpoint but rather a crucial terrain for renegotiating belonging and spatial justice. By focusing on the accounts of hauntings at the shrines of Khuldabad, this paper illuminates the interwoven entanglements that characterise the religious and spiritual landscape of the Deccan region, exposing both the violence of structural neglect and the profound resistance of communities in safeguarding their heritage.