Initiated in 2019 “The Native” is a project with strong focus on online induced solitude. With time, in the middle of 2021, it becomes a survival manifesto and a reminder of our human responsibility. A study of being conscious and choicefull with our resources and daily practices. To know which to implore and which to drop if they become damaging to ourselves or to our environment.

2020 brought new levels of control and surveillance into our lives. Under the claim of “safety”, tracking devices, check-ins, live tracking apps became a norm. Singapore is a prime example, where it’s now impossible to enter the shop without the phone check-in. If I want to get food, I need to use technology and life without it becomes impossible.

In the series, I examine this new social life world order, it’s dangers and limitations. I dissect how relationships continue to be commoditised through devices and technology. They keep influencing our lives and aggressively bite into it, but we ourselves created it and now start drowning in loneliness while still calling the new media “social”. New behaviours gradually shift our personality, reshape our outlook onto the world, communication, desires. We continue turning inwards when we crave turning outwards, slowly becoming incapable of socialising, focusing on ourselves in a narcissist fashion.

The raise of online technology made our life progression possible during the pandemic and helped going through it with limited economical damage. But it also revealed to which point we are social and crave physical company and to which point we are animals that can’t survive without nature.