the vanishing points

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Both the Caribbean and Southeast Asia have been geographies of strategic importance for global powers. In the Caribbean, islands like Trinidad & Tobago were fought over by European empires (the island of Tobago changed hands between the French, Dutch and English over thirty times from the 16th-18th centuries), while Southeast Asia has been a key arena for post-Cold War power struggles and tensions over international trade routes. In these contexts, the concept of liquidated damages encapsulates the predetermined costs these regions have paid due to their strategic importance — loss of territorial integrity, cultural disruption, displacement and erasure, economic exploitation, war and the environmental tolls of being positioned at a crossroads of global power dynamics. Although these damages are calculable after the fact, they were unwritten contracts embedded in the structures and agreements which shaped global trade, labour and territorial control. In legal contracts where liquidated damages are intended to provide clarity and compensation in the event of a breach, the costs enacted by external players were often agreed upon — implicitly or explicitly — by dominant entities before any actual impacts were felt. These losses were not accidental, but an inherent part of the global systemic scaffolding shaping these regions at different points in history.

This collection explores the strategic importance of international trade routes in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, regions both shaped by external forces — colonial powers and global trade systems — which predetermined the linguistic and cultural, economic, political and environmental impacts. The concept of liquidated damages serves as a metaphor, how losses were embedded in the external structures shaping these regions. Burnt edges, passport pages, work visas, immigration stamps and currency notes connote a tangible evidence of economic exchange and a symbolic burn. Collaged currency cut and folded into ship-like forms embody trade vessels carrying materials, human goods and the weight of geopolitical strategy. Each work explores different facets of these predetermined costs — from the intergenerational impacts of the indentured labour and slavery systems in the Caribbean, to the tangible consequences of contested trade routes in Southeast Asia.