How the word "espionage" will resonate within you remains beyond measure. Yet one can surmise that it is often envisioned as an act of deciphering concealed meanings beneath a landscape—an endurance of physical transit and imminent collision. From where does this image you just replayed in your mind originate? Does it branch from the canon of Anglophone fiction? Or perhaps from Hollywood action films that appropriate a Southeast Asian city—one that had already articulated its "third position" as early as 1955—merely as a backdrop to dramatize the peril of a mission? The reproduction of representations that glorify masculine prowess through operations that eliminate internal and external targets, or circumvent traps, has thus coalesced into the prevailing image of "espionage."

In reality, however, true espionage unfolds over seemingly infinite stretches of time, lived out within the precarious instability that resides between intimacy and interpretation. Its success hinges upon a body and a speech that reflect upon hidden meanings and extract intelligence regarding dynamic power relations. What attends the act of relying on treacherous channels of translation and sensing nonverbal cues is not a lucid reward, but an affect born of self-doubt. The Third Language: Espionage, Shifting, at the Equator is designed as a site in Seoul—the heart of South Korea, an island nation undergoing transnational climatic shifts—where rules and propositions are forged to accommodate bodies and perceptions that form a new "South-east." In a third environment where the arduous reading and speaking surrounding one's choices, as well as the ties between body and labor, have gone into hiding, Natasha Tontey and Sareena Sattapon present works that draw forth the reality of espionage sustained amidst a humid, sweltering city.

Natasha Tontey, who has worked primarily in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia, offers Pest to Power and Pest to Power / Hama Memberkati Reading Performance. These works render the language floating through historical speeches, pop culture, and the information-overloaded web through the figures of heterogenous species long dismissed as pests. The human gestures of reciting the discourse of cockroaches conspiring toward an ideal, and posing questions to them, sensuously archive the audiovisual materiality of communities pushed to underdevelopment and the urban periphery. Meanwhile, Sareena Sattapon, raised in Thailand and based in Tokyo, presents You and Me and Everyone We Have Met, which restricts the senses of a worker—unreflected by the glass windows of the metropolis—and the mobility of an individual thinking across English, Japanese, and Thai, so that they may only be viewed in a mirror image. Even as the artist flees from fixed imagery, the work compels those who arrive before the monitor to confront their own faces directly.

In the works of both artists, information leaked across multiple languages functions as a clue for carrying out personal operations—finding one's own path amidst conditions of infinite white noise. Each video is further connected in its multifaceted portrayal of subjects losing their way within themselves, revealing their inner thoughts through the language of the Other or a foreign land. Creative practices sustained across East and Southeast Asia thus emerge as a lifelong project: one far removed from the figures of espionage reproduced by established culture, measuring the possibilities of inter-world mobility and safeguarding individual identity against transnational capitalism. Whether through the lived experience of making a living in exchange for inhaling the chill of a new building erected upon a tropical climate, or by openly bringing in those ousted from that very building to proclaim the community's message, this is, ultimately, an act of espionage designed to draw others into a new state of knowing.

At the center of the space stands the Tropical Bookshelves. The deployed books and materials are layered upon their respective keywords while simultaneously escaping fixed definitions through the participation of the viewers. Their movements fluidize the records of informants writing, speaking, and staying up all night near the equator—barely drying their sweat—within a 'Syntax of Accumulation.' This will serve as a clue to weave together the methods of espionage realized by researchers and artists: from word to word, and from the South-West—located physically in the southwestern part of Seoul—to the South-East. May the syntax born of placing, handing over, and exchanging booklets transcend rigid rules aimed at extracting a single truth, contributing instead to a momentum that makes a 'third language' possible.

As the laborious movements that sift valuable information between power and records accumulate, may new knowledge fill each vacant space. In the time spent looking into the movement of books and words, we wish for what you set out to perceive, and the answer to your unspoken question, to reach you here.

In The Syntax of Accumulation, we sought to collect clues for portraying Southeast Asia through language close to everyday life, bypassing grand narratives and academic discourse. From the words left behind by Natasha and Sareena to those of you, the words gathered without order drift through the exhibition space, each contained within a cube, leaving behind a scattered trail. As words move through processes of generation and deletion, combination and disassembly, the books that make up The Tropical Bookshelves continually seek their place among them. A gaze extending from Seoul will reach the equator, tracing the landscape found there.

Rules

1. Leave your word on the website.
2. A word is randomly selected from the submissions and recorded on a cube.
3. Or, it is randomly deleted.
4. Based on the words, The Tropical Library is rearranged across the cubes.
5. The cubes move.
6. The process repeats throughout the exhibition.

Natasha Tontey (b. 1989) is a Minahasan artist and researcher based in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her practice encompasses film, video, performance, and installation, often exploring alternative futures from the perspectives of marginalised entities. Her recent solo shows include The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism of Disobedient Organs (2026, Ateneo Veneto, Venice), Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre (2024, Museum MACAN, Jakarta), and Garden Amidst the Flame (2022, Auto Italia, London). She received the HASH Award from ZKM | Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2020, and the Han Nefkens Foundation Video Production Grant in 2024.

The artist imagines interspecies unions and the possibilities that lie beyond them. As reiterated through the discourse of the cockroaches and performers in her practice, this is not a surreal fantasy, but a proposition fully achievable within current technological and scientific horizons. Whether as a thought experiment or something transcending that boundary, Natasha Tontey addresses the hybridity emerging at the underbelly of the artificial and the natural, drawing upon Donna J. Haraway's texts and Helen Hester's Xenofeminism as her logical framework.

In this way, as a visual culture researcher, the artist attends to the concept of interspecies communities embedded in narratives reproduced across popular media from the 1990s to the present. She regards transformed bodies or unions of animals, insects, and humans not as monsters, but as companions and "forces" capable of pooling wisdom together. In her artistic universe, humans reliant solely on "reason" are beings that fall and meet defeat precisely because of the frameworks of thought they themselves constructed.

The final reference provided by Natasha Tontey is a VICE Indonesia interview with a man who married a fairy. This selection is not only an act of unearthing meaning through channels that conduct in-depth coverage of topics sidelined by mainstream media—such as fringe phenomena, human rights, and environmental issues—but also an authorial stance that sides with folkloric and supernatural narratives. For her, reading may well be a conduit to harness translated modes arriving from the outside, deploying them to articulate the events taking place within her own domain and the methods of living together.

Sareena Sattapon (b. 1992) is a Thai visual artist based in Tokyo and Bangkok who works across performance, installation, photography, and mixed media. Her practice examines human connection, dis-location, and the dynamics of urban spaces as everyday conditions. Her major solo exhibitions include When you find you in the middle of emptiness (2025, Root K Contemporary, Tokyo), In the realm beyond spectrum (2024, Contemporary Art Foundation, Tokyo), and Until we meet again (2021, Shinokubo UGO, Tokyo). She has participated in group exhibitions across Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and Sweden. She is the recipient of the Nomura Prize 2024 awarded by the Nomura Foundation and Tokyo University of the Arts in 2025, as well as the Runner-Up Prize and Audience Award at the Tokyo Midtown Award in 2024.

For the artist, accumulation is a word intimately intertwined with memory. She has noted that individuals are formed through the memories they accumulate over a lifetime. One experience leads to another, weaving layers of understanding, emotion, and perception. Through continuous accumulation, each person becomes a uniquely distinct entity.

At the same time, the artist views human beings as not entirely separate from one another. When people share experiences, spaces, or memories, a common layer begins to form between them; this ‘shared accumulation’ creates connections that transcend individual differences. Within the context of East and Southeast Asia, the artist is drawn to how collective memory is forged through coexistence, migration, cultural exchange, and everyday encounters. Though individual histories may diverge, shared experiences allow us to recognize ourselves as part of a larger community. In this sense, Sareena recommends the aforementioned books under the theme: “We are independent individuals, yet simultaneously a tightly interconnected unit.”

Naomi Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, and Niwklom’s Tokio Mai Mi Kha [Tokyo Has No Legs] resonate with the themes of ‘media and inter-city mobility’ revealed in her practice. Set against the media landscape of metropolises engineered to sustain transnational capitalism, the travelogue of an individual constantly moving while acquiring foreign art exposes both the external pressures and the inner world of an artist thrust into the field of white noise. In South-east Asia—where a mobile-centric social media ecosystem exerts a powerful influence on community—the artist’s reading list offers a clue to further examine how handheld screens translate the inner self and intervene in the formation of collective memory. The fact that a ‘mobile-first’ environment linked to living conditions can turn into a landscape of frequent mobile scams, or reflect the reality of South-east Asian youth laboring beyond delivery app interfaces, compels us to attend to realities that lie outside simple marketing metrics or market growth figures.