This work departs from the history of indigo as a colonial crop exploited through the forced cultivation system. I understand indigo not only as a textile dye, but as a material that carries violence: destroying the land, forcing bodies to work, and shaping a social
structure based on slavery. Indigo plantations drained the land’s fertility, produced fatigue and disease, and tied Asia, Africa, and Europe together in a single chain of textile and slave trade.

I treat indigo as an ambiguous material. It was used by the colonials as an economic resource and medicine, but it was also toxic and poisonous. Through the concept of “poisoned,” I imagine indigo as a substance that reverses itself—a material that is not only exploited but also contributes to the destruction of the colonial system itself. The
landscape in this work becomes a speculative space where soil, bodies, and plants interact, blurring the boundaries between history, forced labor, and the fiction of material resistance.