Architect: Wendy Teo Atelier
Wendy Teo is a UK ARB/RIBA Chartered Architect, Curator, Researcher and Tutor that seeing embedding social-culture dialogue in forming architecture as her ultimate pursuit.

In 2016, Wendy Teo founded the award winning Borneo Laboratory @ Borneo Art Collective to document tangible and intangible cultural heritage of Borneo. The group executed a number of impact driven art projects and their projects were featured in UK, Germany, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia. In 2017, she founded her own practice Wendy Teo Atelier based in Borneo and operating in cross disciplinary scale.
http://www.wendyteo.com

Curatorial Body: Borneo Laboratory
Borneo Laboratory is a multidisciplinary platform for the experimentation of Borneo Aesthetics - an aesthetics that emphasizes on collaboration and open dialogue. Our movement has been inspired by the idea of ‘Berjalai’- conversing with the world, which is also a deep-rooted cultural idea in Borneo landscape.

Since we started four years ago, we had explored a number of cross regional collaborative workshop projects that involved collaborators from France, Germany, UK, Italy, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. Thus far, our production covers products ranging from publication, documentation, crafts, curation and architectural design.

In our collaboration, we have been consciously engaging people of diverse disciplines. Regardless it is a publication or building, it is crucial for us to see our projects end up delivering empathetic experience with universal value.
http://borneoartcollective.org

Butterfly Garden is a community initiated garden project that was planned, organised and executed by Borneo Laboratory during the semi-lock-down period of Covid 19 pandemic time in Malaysia. As most of the gathering venues in Malaysia or South East Asia are predominantly enclosed, indoor, market driven space, Butterfly garden’s preposition is to provide an alternative, productive ground for community supported edible garden at the downtown Kuching.

To inspire hope, we need to visualize hope. With Butterfly garden’s apparent presence at the rooftop of Think & Tink building, the incremental community efforts in setting up edible garden is serving as a manifestation of positive transition, organised in a city wide scale.

A weekly edible garden community is set up to be openly participated in by the neighborhood. During the weekend, we gather, up-cycle, organise, grow and cook during the day-long productive sessions for the edible garden. There were times our weekly event was disrupted due to the case spike in the community, but we pick up from where we left when things are ok again. Slowly and steadily, our edible garden community is growing. As the construction of this project was carried out during the semi-lockdown period of Kuching, a strategy of minimizing large group gathering and contacting was thought out discreetly for the construction process. Rapid fabrication and rapid assembling strategy was made possible with the network of cutting edge fabricators network extended by Borneo Laboratory with its history of pairing creatives with local fabrication network for productive relationship. As a result, the 3-day assembling timeline was made possible after 2 months of planning.

‘What the caterpillar thinks is the end of the world, the butterfly knows it's only the beginning.’

The quote is also an important message Borneo Laboratory would like to share with its beloved town Kuching, to encourage our community to ‘Connect Widely, Think Deeply and Act Daringly’ in such defining moment of humanity.

The design of the butterfly garden would like to recite the metaphor of butterfly to the viewers from the downtown area, the pavilion rooftop translated butterfly flap’s texture in our patterns design for the canopy. Timber seating is allocated underneath the canopy to view the canopy structure of the installation. Meanwhile the structural frame allows the view of Kuching downtown to be included as the background of the garden.
The project is funded by the Cendana Malaysia (Cultural Economy Development Agency of Malaysia government). Its city wide plastic bottle upcycling campaign has been supported by local platforms such as hotels, shopping malls, educational institutes, NPOs and NGOs of Kuching City.