Dear God, I am not your strongest soldier

Mac Andre Arboleda: It’s been almost a year since I visited your exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2024). I remember sitting in a camouflaged corner of the exhibition while you described the lineage of military service in your family when I realized, I too, was a militarized body.

Kenneth Constance Loe: The project’s been ongoing for four years now and it felt very natural to extend that conversation beyond my own militarized body to include the familial—my dad, my two older brothers, and my mom. There’s a video that featured us playing this board game and we were for the first time talking about our time in service. I didn’t know so much about their experiences in the military, experiences we went through over two generations and all their feelings, future anxieties. My brother talked about his two sons who would eventually have to do national service in the future. In the video material, the extensive found footage I used communicates the work beyond the familial and the psychogeographical borders of Singapore to reflect on other places and states.

MAA: There’s a phrase by scholar Ali Musleh that captures very succinctly the feeling of those visuals: “a martial media ecology.” We’re wired under the US, Trump, Big Tech, and Elon Musk where our very communications are brokered within this surveillance capitalist system, and we’re producing value that’s contributing materially to the export of weapons, the communicative possibilities within warring nations, and this broader project of securitization and surveillance. Every “netizen”, as we call it in the Philippines, is subjected to this system. I’m interested in how the family functions as sort of a social media platform that shaped the way you viewed this service and participated in it; them capacitating you for this role.

KCL: I’m curious what you mean by social media platform?

MAA: We separate media as technology but actually, life and the world are already like media where we’re performing our mediatic capacities. When you look at a screen and you look at a person, it’s almost the same effect, desire, that allows us to do other things. The family as a social media platform; I use it to look at how this thing is a platform of sustained relations, you have your own codes of conduct, the ways you relate to another.

KCL: I think it’s an interesting proposition—how do I then detach? About the role of the ferns, I was postulating them as witnesses to the militarization of civilian bodies…but now I want to go beyond that. If you think of them as witnesses on a social media platform, what are they then? Moderators? (laughs) On a very personal level, I feel like I got what I needed to create a space for conversation. I’m currently trying to produce a performance for this project, and I feel kind of stuck. I want to move beyond body memory, the idea of military drills, past the familial and autobiographical. When I was working on the video installation, it was against the backdrop of mass mobilizations that were happening throughout the globe and the reintroduction of conscription in some countries.

MAA: I think about this notion of complicity: when you’re a member of a nation state, a user of Big Tech platforms, and inhabiting a land that’s occupied by a military. But we’re also always having to adapt to these damages. The military industrial complex is one of the most harmful contributors to the climate crisis, and I’m trying to survive the storms and heatwaves in the Philippines. These ferns may already be moving, migrating, changing. I remember some Philippine plants brought to botanical gardens in the UK and I think of this idea of fugitivity. For as long as we’re intimately located within these centers of power, we’re also deemed both valuable and disposable.

KCL: These ferns occupy a complicated position, being restricted from public access and how their survival happens to be within military training grounds. It’s not as if their conservation is a conscious effort by the military, but it points out some interesting entanglements. We’re talking about Singapore as a microcosm almost…There’s the ferns that are living organisms, and then there are the ferns I’ve upholstered as sculptures out of military textiles and secondhand army uniforms. There, in between, is the porosity that I’m trying to grapple with.

MAA: Maybe the ferns, even at the core of their survival, aren’t simply silent witnesses but also active participants in their survival and remaking. They’re as critically endangered and near threatened as us humans—we’re always near the face of being wiped out. There’s a challenge and beauty in it, that the world’s so entangled. I think we need to look beyond the “value”. If you think about its [Mandarin Chinese] etymology, it means “broken umbrella” right? This is what the scholar Neferti Tadiar scrutinizes, this active wasting where humans are deemed waste the moment they are turned valuable. In military logic, these ferns aren’t needed.

KCL: I think that’s also where the project looks at, that interfacing of these ferns and the military while omitting the ecosystem that it’s a part of. There’s the National Parks Board of the Government of Singapore that’s responsible for their conservation but also checking in on competing species. They need to regularly make sure that these ferns have the space to grow so that the four remaining populations in Singapore still survive (laughs). When you fold in more actors, it complicates the unidirectional stance towards security. It was very clear to me that for the video and the family conversations, that question of necessity and security had to be circumvented or avoided. They don't usually go further because the question comes extremely quickly. The moment that happens, you’re getting into a really locked space. There was one time my brother brought it up out loud and I said, “Oh, you know I have my own thoughts about this.” And of course, this video that I made is trying to go about it in a longer route.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kenneth Constance Loe (he/they) is an artist, writer, and performer from Singapore, and currently based in Vienna, Austria. Their practice revolves around material and sensorial fetishes of desire, poetics of hospitality, body memory, queer ecologies, and other tangential thoughts through a performative collocation of sculpture, video, movement, text, and olfactory objects. He has presented his work in Singapore, Vienna, Sofia, Yogyakarta, Tallinn, New York, Brussels and Auckland, among other cities, and was a web resident of »Algorithmic Poetry« curated by Liquid Architecture and Akademie Schloss Solitude's Digital Solitude. Their diploma project Bua Cek / 破傘蕨 was shortlisted for the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2024 and their poetry manuscript sun-dried air was a finalist of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize. Their poetry has been published in rivulet 10: sound barrier and the anthology New Singapore Poetries (Gaudy Boy, 2022). Mostly recently, they have been awarded the Mentoring Program Art 2025 scholarship by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. https://www.kennethloe.com/

Mac Andre Arboleda is an artist interested in exploring the sickness of the Internet through research and dialogue, art and text, organizing and publishing. They are the Founding President of the UP Internet Freedom Network and currently an artist-in-residence at Dreaming Beyond AI. They are currently based in San Pedro City, Philippines while finishing their MA in Media Arts Cultures under an Erasmus Mundus Scholarship (University for Continuing Education Krems, Austria; Aalborg University, Denmark; University of Lodz, Poland; LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore). https://sickinternet.me

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