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Tropical Lab is the brainchild of Milenko Prvacki, Senior Fellow at LASALLE. It is an intensive and highly engaging art camp that brings together estudents from various art colleges and institutions around the world. The camp includes a series of workshops, talks and seminars guided by established international and Singaporean artists, culminating in an exhibition hosted by the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore at LASALLE.
 
The aims and objectives of Tropical Lab are to:
• Expand the views of the participants, exchange experiences and to stimulate creative thinking through a collaborative approach. 
• Create a positive environment that will stimulate and cultivate minds, imaginations, emotional (intuitive) consciousness, and cultural sensibilities of the emerging generation of young artists and students.
• Establish LASALLE as an institution that offers an environment for regional and international students to carry out research and advance their art practice in a short period. This will strengthen the value and potential of having a programme that is culturally relevant to a range of local, regional, and international students.

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Tropical Lab 17: Playground

Tropical Lab is an annual international art camp organised by LASALLE College of the Arts for masters degree and Ph.D candidates. Over two weeks led by Senior Fellow, Milenko Prvački, students from international art schools and institutions undertake workshops and seminars in Singapore exploring various aspects of history, geography, culture and aesthetics.

Playground – a vast, open free space set for sociocultural, physical-embodied and artistic creative explorations. Often deeply associated with the developmental journey of humans as children, it has historically remained a boundless space of raw discovery, joy and social bonding. From spaces fecund with human potential, playgrounds have transformed, in much of the late 20th century, into normative, adult spaces – determined and managed by adults as to what people (both as children and adults) should explore, how to consume and perform play. Attendant to this is how to determine the safety and surveil interaction with others.

Playgrounds today, more than ever, are fraught with contested freedoms in the determination of space, what is contained within a space and who should be in this space. This has been at the heart of the formation of the 20th century’s major political offering: the nation-state, an endless line of perforations between communities, languages, oceans and ideas.

In cultural studies, playgrounds have also transmogrified into digital and corporate spaces, and are determining features of the ‘new office’ of the future. While in the art world, the concept of the playground has liberated the artist and unleashed them into a world of excess and access to methods, materials, approaches and potentials. The question of who determines and outlines play, the ground and the interrelation between play and ground and who sets the ground rules of the playground forms the springboard for this edition.

TROPICAL LAB VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS