Elia Nurvista and Bagus Pandega: Nafasan Bumi ~ An Endless Harvest

Artists Elia Nurvista and Bagus Pandega explore how the demands of a relentless extraction, from plantations to electric futures, cast a shadow on the very "breath of the Earth."

Elia Nurvista and Bagus Pandega: Nafasan Bumi ~ An Endless Harvest imagines the afterlives of materials that persist long after their use, outlasting our time in this age of excess. Plantations, mining sites, and the promise of electric vehicle technologies become places where the stories of tomorrow are formed, bound by Indonesia’s extractive economies whose resources sustain the pulse of today’s global demand.

From the need for oxygen to nickel’s role in lithium-ion technologies, from the cutting down of forests to palm oil’s many applications, these materials represent the state of the Earth’s breath (Nafasan Bumi) today, strained by extraction. The planet’s natural rhythms no longer move freely but are drawn into the labour of industry, breathing through the exhaustion of a harvest that never ends.

Across the exhibition, labour appears as both memory and speculation, a rhythm shared by humans, machines, and the living world. Conveyor belts, once emblems of the industrial revolution and the mechanisation of labour, now hum to the pulse of tropical plants, creating a continuous cycle of productivity. Nearby, sculptures cast in palm oil wax evoke the stillness of carved stone yet resist ideals of perfection, creating a dreamscape haunted by plantation residues. Others, made from discarded palm waste, hold the tension between fragility and endurance.

Together, these artworks trace how human and non-human life have been enmeshed in cycles of ceaseless pursuit of productivity, asking: What will the future shaped by these material conditions? Like the recurring haze that engulfs Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia during the southwest monsoon, the Earth’s breath, shadowed by an endless harvest, lingers as a reminder of what extraction conceals and refuses to let us forget. ~

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Host or Publisher Xin Xuan Lee