Between Tongues: A Glossary of Ghosts

Southeast Asian photographic and critical vocabulary has largely been inherited rather than built, its genre categories, historiographic models, and survey logic borrowed from a Western apparatus designed for different image histories. This seminar-workshop begins from a different premise: that the region already possesses words, figures, and forms of knowledge equipped to describe what that borrowed apparatus cannot hold. The session opens with ghost stories and superstitions as starting points, not as folklore but as method: vernacular figures such as hantu and penunggu are presences tied to place that persist without belonging to any official record. From there, participants move into a collaborative working session, surfacing words, phrases, visual material or concepts from within the region's own languages and image cultures that resist clean translation into existing critical terms, and asking what kind of knowledge-making becomes possible once untranslatability is treated as a method rather than a limitation.

Drawing on the facilitator's research into spectral methodology, jalan-jalan as postcolonial archival practice, and the paracuratorial interval, the workshop treats refusal and resistance as productive rather than merely defensive positions. Rather than closing with a fixed argument, the session contributes to a working, collective glossary, the beginning of an ongoing, publicly accessible project: a growing untranslatable visual dictionary that participants and future contributors can continue to add to.