Musquiqui Chihying is a visual artist and a filmmaker who resides and works in Taipei and Berlin. His artistic endeavors explore the entanglements of post- and trans-modernity in the Global South, postcolonial identity, and the politics of technology. His current research engages with Afro-Asian maritime histories, from the circuits of indentured labour in the Indian Ocean to contemporary infrastructural and smart-city projects led by Chinese technology corporations in Africa. Musquiqui Chihying’s works have been exhibited in numerous international art institutions, including Hayward Gallery in London, HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Art Sonje Center in Seoul, Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others. His film works have been screened at various film festivals, including Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, Berlin International Film Festival in Germany, Rotterdam Film Festival in the Netherlands, and the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. In 2023, he was awarded the Tung Chung Prize by The Hong Foundation in Taiwan. In 2019, he received the LOOP Video Art Award from the Han Nefkens Foundation and the Joan Miró Foundation in Spain.
Fluid Archive: From Indentured Labour to the Smart City
How might the contemporary smart city be understood through the longer history of colonial technologies used to record, organise, and control people and their movement? This presentation uses the idea of the fluid archive to bring nineteenth-century images of indentured labour into dialogue with contemporary digital infrastructures across the Afro-Asian Indian Ocean. Following the abolition of slavery, Aapravasi Ghat in Mauritius became a central site in the British Empire’s indenture system. From the 1860s onwards, colonial authorities increasingly used photography, registration, and identification records to document workers and regulate their movement across the island. Today, these photographs remain part of the historical archive of indenture. At the same time, Mauritius is being repositioned as a digital and financial hub between Africa and Asia, connected through submarine cables, data networks, and large-scale smart-city developments. Rather than suggesting a direct equivalence between indentured labour and digital urbanism, this presentation looks at a recurring logic within both systems: the attempt to turn movement into information, and information into a means of administration and control. By reading colonial identification photographs alongside maps, network diagrams, and images of smart-city infrastructure, the presentation asks whether the smart city represents a genuine technological break, or another chapter in a longer history of making people, territories, and circulation increasingly visible and manageable.