Residency at Rimbun Dahan (2025)
I spent a month at Rimbun Dahan in November 2025, experimenting with writing with a more personal voice while pushing past the thorny exterior of the durian.
Rimbun Dahan is home to many fruiting kampung durian trees. The durian trees tower over everything else around them. They even make most of the other trees look miniscule in comparison. Once you learn how to spot them, you begin to see them everywhere: these spindly, resilient towers.
Whilst the lands themselves might have changed hands multiple times over the past decades, the durian trees themselves have remained. The durian trees stand sentinel, silent observers to the past and future lives of the soils they are rooted into.
Most of which have been on the compound before the current owners moved in. I’m told that the durian trees have endured because their fruit is so well loved and prized. Other cash crops or fruit trees may be grown around them, flower, bear fruit, and eventually fade away – but the durian will always remain.
Whilst elimination by human selection is less of a threat, the trees must still weather through natural selection. Lightning strikes, parasitic breaches and other natural phenomena are part for the course and many of the trees in the compound bear the physical scars of these encounters: peeling barks, opportunistic tendrils, and broken branches.
Reading these marks, it becomes clear that the durian trees here are living archives. They bear witness to the stories of the earth whilst wearing their own stories on their sleeves.
Writing with those towering giants in clear view completely reshaped my head space. At the end of my residency, I produced a short text titled A Prickly Affair and presented this at the Open Studio programme.