Priyageetha Dia creates works that challenge dominant historical narratives by foregrounding the colonial memory and labor histories of Southeast Asia. LAMENT H.E.A.T is a video installation that recalls the colonial history of rubber plantations in the Malay Peninsula and the memories of Tamil migrant laborers who once worked there. “LAMENT” refers to an oppari, a traditional Tamil funeral dirge sung by women, while “H.E.A.T” is an acronym invented by Dia representing the Tamil words Hevea Errichal Automation Tech, which evokes ritualized technologies of the rubber tree marked by heat, pain, and exploitation.
The installation takes shape as a constructed room built from rubberwood and sheets of latex. The herringbone pattern, reminiscent of the technique used to tap rubber, is inscribed directly on the exterior. Inside, the rhythm of traditional percussion resonates alongside moving images staged within a 3D-animated plantation. Burning trees and other motifs of “heat” emerge, while an AI-generated oppari is transmitted through the environment by drones. Indentured laborers from South India brought the lamentation practice known as oppari singing to colonial Malaya—the southern part of the Malay Peninsula and northern Borneo—where it became a way to mourn the deaths of workers lost to the violence of the plantation economy. The lament is re-enacted here through technology as a ritual of communion with nonhuman beings and with the memories of the land. By illuminating suppressed voices and historical absences through imaginative re-narrations, Dia proposes new ways of confronting history and carrying memory forward into the future.