Research
Long Hanging Fruits
Harvested oil palm fruit in a village in Paser, East Kalimantan, awaits processing. The extracted oil will soon enter a global supply chain, becoming part of products marketed thousands of miles away.
Long Hanging Fruits is an artistic research that tries to explore the complexity behind the economics and politics of palm oil. It engages with the long-standing debates surrounding ecological devastation, labor exploitation, and land conflicts affecting Indigenous communities in the Global South, while also interrogating the promotion of palm oil as a “green” solution through its use in biofuels—positioned as a technical fix to global warming and peak oil.
At the core of this project is an inquiry into the paradoxes embedded in the palm oil economy: the tensions between ethics and politics, and the ways in which these are entangled with capital and profit. I aim to examine how investments in the palm oil industry have shaped policies and political decisions, and to question the moral and political responsibilities of governments, corporations, investors, and shareholders in the face of ecological and humanitarian crises.
These same actors—through market forces, legal frameworks, and global financial systems—have also constructed the regulatory environment for joint-stock corporations and transnational investments. This infrastructure has enabled cooperation between metropolitan capital and frontier or local entrepreneurs, often at the cost of environmental and social justice.
Drawing from various sources, including investigative reports, academic journals, field notes, and first-hand observations, this research compiles and presents these findings in both textual and artistic forms. Through the lens of palm oil, the project seeks to reveal the contradictions and paradoxes within the global circulation of commodities and the systems that sustain them.