Maps Southeast Asian video criticism through David Teh’s lexicon of “withdrawal/avoidance/evasion,” where artists mobilize allegory, hauntology, and counterhistory to expose state capture while refusing the nation-state as the primary horizon of meaning in favor of supranational and longue-durée imaginaries (Zomia, Isaan, animist cosmologies). Interrogates the costs of Western-comparative art histories and institutional display—censorship, recuperation, and global labor extraction—arguing that the region’s moving-image practices stage antagonistic temporalities and mythic-historical deconstructions that contest authoritarian modernity without guaranteeing political transformation.

Decolonization is posed as the necessary horizon of political action in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene: a break with neoliberal “accumulation by dispossession,” technological rationality, and the colonial epistemologies that normalize differential access, sacrifice zones, and the collapse of democratic representation. Through the speculative occupation of a luxury tourism complex, the text imagines recomposed autonomy and translocal solidarity grounded in indigenous embodied knowledges and commons-based governance, redirecting modern infrastructure toward collective reproduction and ecological repair rather than extractive development.