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In my overlapping interests with academic research, through my installation, photography and bookmaking work, I trace the history of opium and coffee in upland southeast Asia. Means to think through  land, labor, and logistics in the region.

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These photographs, and installation images, are from my artistic research series, Fields and Farms (2022, textile and metal installation with images and texts). This comes off my field and archival research on the history of coffee production in Northern Thailand.  Once opium producing lands, towards the end of the Cold War, these upland regions were soon converted into coffee farms through a Highland Development project initiated by the Thai monarchy. The intention was to sustain communities away from opium production, and to transition landscapes away from open air opium farms, to shaded agro-forests producing coffee and other crops. Through these initiatives, indigenous communities were often given land, and capital, but forced to enter into capitalist modes of production where they soon began to accrue debt. The landscape itself wavering back and forth proper agro-forests to relatively open air coffee plantations. This varying conditions of land and labor began to also produce questions around light for me, at what costs are shade and forests produced, and at what costs light remains clear in open air plantations? Who owns this condition of light? And how would one define shade as it were?

In my overlapping threads between art-making and academic vein, I have also produced an academic photo essay, writing more of my field entries, and is part of my dissertation work Forested Media. You can find the photo essay here.

All images of the forest are by me. The installation images are from Toả (Foliage IV), curated by Do Tuong Linh, and Abhijan Toto). The show took place in VCCA (Hanoi) in September 2022.







 
 
The images above are a few pages from my artbook “In the mountain, the only money is opium.” This artbook materialized much of my research on opium trade in southeast Asia during the Cold War. Opium grown in the upland forests by indigenous communities, became a major source of income, for many of the region’s armed resistance, paramilitary, or CIA operations. These overlapping networks of traders and buyers, deeply entangled the control of logistics in the forest,  ethnic identity and drug trade. In this book I focus on the Golden Triangle,  a triangular point  on the Mekong between the shared borders of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand. This artbook is result of fieldvisits to Golden Triangle, archival work on opium trade, and speculative inquiry  on these histories.

If my research on coffee, asks questions on how landscapes look and feel like in the present, then with my research on opium I precisely trace its cold war contours.  My entire body of work tracing the history of opium to coffee in upland southeast Asia.

Design credit for the artbook shared between  Faida Raichman and Yonaz Kristy.

Email
pujita@ucsb.edu
pujita.guha90@gmail.com


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