The Stories are on the Mountain

The 5th Pulima Art Festival (2020-21) organizes curatorial projects that rethink the meanings and processes of contemporary curation. Festival programmers selected six curators, each from a different Indigenous background. Beginning in April 2020, they traveled to 6 communities across Taiwan to conduct field research for projects around their personal experiences of return. In July they began to realize their projects in a series of performances and installations. The 5th project, Truku of tomorrow: Dgaiyaq Uking is vanishing (明日部落：太魯閣之殤), curated by Bunun creator Talum Isbabanal, opened in Hualien in February 2021. While Talum is Bunun, he chose to work in a Truku community, connecting with community members to curate an installation around land development and protection. 

On the outskirts of Taroko National Park, in the Minle community, I spent the afternoon with Talum Isbabanal and Yukan Yulaw. Talum was the curator for the upcoming installation Truku of tomorrow: Dgaiyaq Uking is vanishing, while Yukan was managing exhibit design. I walked with them around the house Talum was renting in the community, looking for materials for the installation. We gathered pieces of unused wood and damaged door panels; old, irregularly shaped objects that were already used or broken. They were things that could be picked up anytime, part of the daily landscape of the community. But in Yukan’s eyes, these discarded materials were precious in their own right, as valuable as gold or a fresh water source.

Talum is Bunun, from the Taoyuan community in Kaohsiung. When he was two years old, his mother brought him to live in Taipei City, where he grew up. Today he is an actor and also runs a studio with his family, working as a journalist and shooting news reports for Taiwan Indigenous Television. Part of Talum’s current curatorial project is linked with his news documentary “Oppose Asia Cement and the Return Our Lands (反亞泥還我土地運動).” This opposition movement dates back to the mid-1970s, when Asia Cement Corporation established a factory in Hualien and leased Indigenous-owned land in order to mine the natural minerals. At first, Asia Cement seemed to support local development, but over time they developed an arrangement with the local government and began to exploit the land and its resources. The company strengthened their power through a range of tactics: they obtained a series of “administrative orders” from the government, generated economic dependencies among local communities, and directly cheated landowners, stealing large tracts of land. These strategies resulted in internal divisions within Indigenous communities in the area, as well as a profound loss of land and culture. 

However, rather than explicitly foregrounding Asia Cement Corporation and local opposition movements, Talum’s curatorial vision for Truku of tomorrow is to capture and present peoples’ lived experiences within this context. Therefore, this curatorial project starts with an image of Xincheng Mountain (the contested site of Asia Cement’s mining operations) in the process of becoming a “half-mountain.” The exhibit includes five short films centered on the theme of “theft,” an installation of “memory traces”, and a monologue “Wandering in foreign lands (流浪在他鄉).” He also invites Liu Xiaohui, creator and long-time Hualien resident, to share a series of six video works entitled 2 Gone mountain (山不見山). 

The challenges Truku communities are facing today are part of a long history of dispossession. A hundred years ago people endured violent invasions and forced migration under Japanese colonial rule. In the 1960s, Taiwan’s post-war development (backed by the United States) and construction of the Central Cross-Island Highway reshaped the landscape, generating new demands for labor, mining, and electricity. And in 1986 Taroko National Park was established on Truku lands, imposing new restrictions on land use and limiting access to ancestral homes. Over time, these histories have gradually eroded the relationship between Truku people and the land, creating a strong sense of separation and loss. Amidst these narratives, how can creators work at the level of curation to express the land trauma, loss of place, and spiritual displacement that Truku people have survived for so long?
   
When ShanDongYe Theater performed the piece Wandering in an abundant world (富世漫步, 2020), they raised a creative challenge: how can we tell a mountain story if we stand at the foot of the mountain? The same question may be asked of Truku of tomorrow. When I was visiting Talum in Minle, I asked a steady stream of questions while we gathered installation materials. In a sudden moment of stillness, he turned to me and said, “The stories are all on the mountain. Why don’t you come up with me?”