SWAB Barcelona Art Fair October 2 – 5, 2025

I’ll be in Barcelona with SUAVEART as part of the SWAB Art Fair – Polar & Tropic section with the exhibition titled Camphor Tree Chronicles, presenting a multidisciplinary exploration that combines archives, painting, sound, and video. It examines the camphor tree as the “protagonist” in its cultural journey from Asia to Europe. At the art fair, visitors can experience traces of the camphor tree scattered throughout the venue—in public areas such as SWAB RADIO × STATION OF COMMONS, posters, performance, and talk.

From Thursday, October 2, to Sunday, October 5, SUAVEART presents Camphor Tree Chronicles, a project that intertwines ecological reflection with artistic practice centered on the tree. Expanding and emphasizing the notion of “slow time,” the exhibition disrupts the linear tempo of contemporary society, engages with current discourses on the “more-than-human,” and reimagines curatorial narratives and artistic forms through the lens of the camphor tree.  The exhibition brings together Taiwanese artist Hsin-Chieh Hung and Indonesian artist Aliansyah Caniago, whose works navigate themes of disappearance and survival, colonial memory, locality, and diaspora. The scent of camphor threads across civilizations, carrying with it layered histories of encounter and exchange. Through smell, touch, and sight, audiences are invited to tune into the subtle rhythms of plant life. These aromatic memories reveal the intricate entanglements of early global trade and the cultural crossings bound up with the so-called “Eastern scents.”

Swab Barcelona is an independent platform dedicated to gathering and giving visibility to emerging practices that shape the current contemporary art scene. Focused on new languages and collaborative forms, Swab promotes relationships and exchanges that contribute to a diverse and sustainable cultural ecosystem, seeking a balance between the market’s role and the public purpose of artistic creation.

The program brings together twelve projects through exhibitions organized around an agora, which hosts an extensive public program. Curated by Tenthaus, Bunga Siagian, and Jatiwangi Art Factory (JAF), it will feature a video project, a shared editorial space, a radio and listening station, and an area dedicated to dialogue and casual interaction, inspired by the Indonesian practice of nongkrong and the communal spirit of the sauna — meeting points that, although originating in geographically distant contexts, in POLAR AND TROPIC dialogue and coexist, revealing affinities in the construction of the commons.

The guiding question of this encounter is how to expand the network and how to make it sustainable. How to continue? How to generate lasting structures of mutual support and collaboration, capable of sustaining possible futures?