SOU: Streams of Undercurrents
Initiated by a dedicated team of artists and curators from Southeast Asia and North Africa, SOU is a platform structured as a porous infrastructure—one that cultivates shifting relations between local contexts, transregional networks, and the public sphere. It operates as a site for research, production, artistic retreat, and gathering, enabling focused individual practice as well as small-group convenings and collaborations.
Rooted in Asia–Africa lineages and contemporary urgencies, SOU offers space for reflection, experimentation, and sustained cultural exchange. Its programmes engage the notion of undercurrents as collective formations moving against canonised narratives: fugitive knowledge systems, minor histories, and practices of transmission grounded in Global Majority solidarities.
In its first phase, SOU concentrates on three core programmes for artistic development and exchange: SOU|TH, a curatorial development programme for curators and cultural workers across the Global Majority; SOU|ND, a rhizomatic, transcontinental exchange programme cultivating long-term artistic dialogue and collaboration; and SOU|L, a self-organised artistic or curatorial retreat for an individual or duo at SOU’s residency space in Chiang Mai.
SOU seeks to imagine forms of cohabitation, care, and knowledge production that resist extractive logics and colonial continuities. Emphasising relationality over possession and situated knowledge over universal claims, the platform considers how artistic practice can function as a tool for rethinking autonomy, labour, ecology, and memory—particularly from the margins. Attentive to histories of oppression and strategies of resistance, SOU positions itself as a living, critical site for reimagining what it might mean to be in-common across difference, without erasure.