From the Field
One archive in photographs and film. It records the work the cuisine grows from, on expeditions with indigenous community partners across Sarawak. Curated by Atlas Collective.
Indigenous food knowledge is one of the most fragile things any culture holds. It lives in seasonal practice, in spoken instruction, in the hands of elders and in each community’s relationship with the forest that feeds it. Once it lapses, it cannot be rebuilt. We founded Serumpun to stop that loss as partners, working over years with Sarawak’s peoples, its scientific and cultural institutions, and a kitchen that treats heritage as something still alive.
The work begins with consent and continues with reciprocity. The communities lead the fieldwork themselves. We record knowledge with their permission and give it back to them in a form they can use: recipes returned to households, ingredients mapped to forest plots, spoken material archived in their own languages. The studio is a tool, and the communities are the authors. That order governs every decision the project makes.
The work follows a set framework. Three lenses (culture, experience and cuisine) are applied to each community’s life. Under each lens we map eleven themes: craft, economy, culture, festivals, legends, heroes, symbols, landmarks, literature, sound and music, and nature.
Each community is placed in its ecological setting, whether forest, highlands, river, sea, coast or city, and looked at from five angles. How people live day to day. How they produce and make things. How they deal with the natural world. How their cultural traditions adapt to modern use. And what the community itself finds beautiful and inspiring.
This framework is how we listen before we cook. It lets the cuisine honour a community without flattening it, and lets a foreign technique arrive as a guest instead of a coloniser.
The cuisine grows out of the field. Serumpun would not exist without the expeditions, and without the listening and gathering, and the partnership with the indigenous communities whose knowledge the platform carries.
This page records that work, in photographs and in film. It grows as the fieldwork grows.
Twelve frames from the field, of time with elders and work alongside seed-keepers, foragers and home cooks. With them are short films of the recipes, ingredients and household practice the communities have trusted us with.
Field record: film I → Field record: film II →
Photographs and films by Atlas Collective. The archive is still growing, and new entries go up as the fieldwork goes on. Its main home is the Serumpun Sarawak Instagram channel, @serumpunsarawak.
What is the Serumpun archive?
One archive, in photographs and film, of the fieldwork Serumpun Sarawak grows from: time with elders, and work alongside seed-keepers, foragers and home cooks, on expeditions with indigenous community partners across Sarawak.
Who made the photographs and films?
Atlas Collective made and curates them.
What do the films record, and with whose consent?
The recipes, ingredients and household practice the communities have trusted us with. The communities decide what is shared, and the studio records only what they agree to.
How can I help the fieldwork?
If you can document, fund or guide, write to connect@chefjameswon.com and tell me what you do.
We listen before we cook. The cuisine grows from that habit.
James Won
The forest edits and the communities write. The studio records what they agree to share.