Welcome to the Offshore Residency Program! Artists and researchers from different fields interested in offshore ecosystems, the Global South, indigenous communities, and the regional politics of Southeast Asia will be invited to Pulau Dinawan, an island southwest of Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, Malaysia, for a three-month residency and cultural exchange. Our studio was invited to design visuals and a website to promote the residency.

This residency program took place in Sabah, a geographical and cultural place with rich natural resources, migrant histories, indigenous communities, and multiple faiths. We invited artists to engage in research and artistic creation during the residency. During the program, we also invited scientists, filmmakers, philosophers, anthropologists, and other researchers from different intellectual and cultural backgrounds to participate in intensive discussions and thinktank-style research.

This new community group, which thinks and practices collectively, also considers and explores urgent global issues: how should we think about the influence that human activity is having on nature? How should we understand the restrictions that the urgency of climate change places on our collective fate? How should we envision the present and the future, and acknowledge our global inter-connectedness?

Here “Offshore” is not used conventionally, like the economic term in international shipping; it is an eternal, sustained verb. “Offshore” hopes to present different verb tenses—it symbolizes the ecological fate of Pulau Dinawan within the contexts of global climate change and slowly shifting tectonic plates, but it also serves as a metaphor for the temporary intellectual community built by this residency. By escaping the confines built by politics, we provide space for imagination, experimentation, and exchange among thinkers and practitioners.

The Offshore website was developed by Marco Land.

Offshore Artist Residency