Intertidal Polyphonies
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Guadalupe Martinez Reading
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In this audio recording, Guadalupe Martinez reads a section from her course syllabus on Performance Art. She taught this course at UBC in 2018, and the questions she raises on this syllabus are questions reflected in her creative works (discussed in her interviews). Martinez stresses the overlap of poetics and politics in performance art and how the embodiment of such ideas contributes to larger discussions. However, she also notes that performance art is being changed by its recent acceptance into more dominant / mainstream culture and academia, and that these changes impact how performance art functions in relation to poetry and politics.
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Helix Bridge 2
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River and the underside of Helix Bridge. Bridge support on the left side. Gardens by the Bay in the background.
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Jason Wee 1
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Jason Wee discusses his artistic practice and how he moves between mediums., Jason Wee: I’m Jason Wee. I’m from Singapore, I live between Singapore and New York now, and I’m an artist and a writer, and I run Grey Projects here in Singapore. I think a lot what the idea deserves when I think of the medium, so that’s really how I work now. So sometimes it’s really where the reading or the original inspiration or the material that I’ve found would lead me, and I would follow it for as long as I can. And sometimes I could start with an image—like a photographic image—but the result is really in the end a video or a drawing, and other times I would begin from a text like Boey Kim Cheng’s poetry and then I end up with sculpture or installation. And I think that’s partly a function of how my brain works. I think I’m internally restless enough that I can’t sit with one without feeling like actually the medium or the form would actually exhaust me, and then I feel like I would need to move to something else for awhile before I come back to it.
[1:12]
Joanne Leow: Do you think it’s the nature of what you’re interested in? I mean I know you’re interested in space generally, but also urban space, and you’ve been working on islands and coastlines. Is it because of the quality of the thing that you’re focusing on?
[1:24]
Jason Wee: Partly. I think it’s also how I stumbled into art; I didn’t think that I would be an artist, honestly. I wanted to be a writer first. It’s because I had such a difficult time coming out with fresh poems—I had a terrible writer’s block—that I came into art. And even when I came into art through photography—and that’s what I did initially and that’s what I went to graduate school for—with photography it wasn’t so much the medium, you know, the paper you use or the camera you use, as much as why the camera in the first place? I was interested in how certain kinds of discursive acts come together around certain kinds of materials or machines to generate a tradition that we identify as a genre or a particular kind of art medium. And so, at the back of it, there’s often something discursive. In my head it produces a kind of fluidity that then generates other kinds of possibilities. Like it could sometimes be solely discursive in the way that I then only want to think philosophically, and then the outcome is really a conversation or a text. And I feel like this is a really embodied experience, like even thinking philosophically, that sometimes the thinking runs up against something in me that I feel can only come out sensorially. Like I need to touch something, I need to move something, I need to go somewhere, and then at that time, sometimes, the output changes, so at that time, the ideas become material because of an engagement that I need with the world though my senses.
[3:05]
Joanne Leow: So then the materiality sort of comes back in that way.
[3:09]
Jason Wee: Yeah. There’s a quote that always runs in my head a lot, and I feel the reason why archipelagos and islands resonate with me a lot is partly also because of, “the leaves and grass grow where we contain multitudes.” And I feel that often, like, no man’s an island because no man’s one island, I’m, like, several islands.
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Jason Wee 2
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Jason Wee discusses his work with islands and reclaimed sand in Singapore. He discusses the early maps of Singapore and his use of photo-rendering software to produce fictional photographs of Singapore., Joanne Leow: Obviously some of your work has focused on islands, and then there are sort of archetypal thinking behind islands, like is it a paradise, is it a desert, are there—as you put it—shadow islands beneath islands, which is really fascinating. You’re saying that you have many islands, and yet obviously we come from a place that is very singular in many ways. This exceptional red dot. I mean, how do you see your practice and your work, thinking through that kind of dominant idea of what this island is?
[0:31]
Jason Wee: Originally, it started with thinking that space isn’t simply the kind of vessel in which we enter into and in which other things happen, that the space itself is produced and it’s the result of a long—I suspect—a long generative process. Then I get intrigued about what those generations—how many generations could I identify, and where do I begin to look? And so initially a lot of the work that I did right out of grad school and in the first few years in New York was mostly looking at the cartographical depictions of Singapore and of Southeast Asia; what did the anticipation of Southeast Asia produce? So even before there was visual contact, what did they expect to see, as they draw it out. Even when they pass through the straits then, there is still this large southern continent that is partly ice, partly land but they have no idea and eventually they realize…and eventually it became Australia, and so those are the materials that I began with. And that’s also partly in connection to plays by Pao Kun, actually, that I look both in the west and I tried to identify the maps that Zhenglte used on his journeys to Mauritius and to see how those maps were drawn up. And what’s interesting to me about those maps was that they were not drawn spatially, they had—they don’t give dimensions in space, so they give dimensions in time; they tell you how long it takes to get from one landmark to another. And so Singapore the island was only identified by the landmark, so I started from maps and then also began thinking that if an idea of Singapore occurs before there was visual contact, that means there was also an idea of Singapore even before…it allows me to get under the idea of the founding of Singapore / Singapore having been found. So, the idea that Singapore exists already imaginatively as a kind of paradise or utopia then began a series of work where I rendered those maps using these kinds of photo rendering programs that people use to create backdrops for science fiction film. Say when John Carter flies, is supposed to fly all the way to Mars, but we can’t really fly to Mars, so someone renders that planet. So, I used those softwares to render the islands of Southeast Asia as they expect to see them, and then presented them as photographs, as real spaces. And that kind of illusion of the real landscape, the uncanny or the unreal, then produces a moment in the gallery of skepticism and doubt, not so much about the image as much as it is about how we are seen and why did they expect to even see what they want to see.
[3:30]
Joanne Leow: Yeah, and you disrupt the ways of seeing, then, in some senses. There’s other means of thinking that you can disrupt, right?
Jason Wee: Yeah.
Joanne Leow: Suddenly you recognize other fictions that have been told to you about particular islands, which is really fascinating. One other thing that really struck me when you were describing it is this idea of this use of technology, this use of rendering. What do you think is the relation between your use of this technology in order to produce something that is in that gap between the real and fictional? Sometimes I think the large amounts of aggregate sand, other things that we’re using to produce something is also akin to the sort of fantastical utopian.
[4:10]
Jason Wee: The thing for me also was, while I produce this kind of unreal space, that it didn’t, in some ways, function as a fiction. The utopian and paradisiacal spaces are sometimes a version of the real rather than a space that someone immediately identifies as false, and then dismiss as pure fantasy. So, in fact what happens a lot when they look at the image is that they go, “why haven’t I been there, why haven’t I seen this, where did you shoot this from?” It’s really that kind of, like, “how did you get to? Why is it so pristine?” and so on, before slowly it comes back to them and go “oh, maybe this is…” So it’s that moment that’s very interesting, because when that moment begins where they start to question themselves, then it starts this conversation about how much of the way we build space and the way we live in them actually depends on utopian thinking, that utopian thinking isn’t so much about creating / identifying only far-off ideals, but sometimes it’s often used to just simply identify the next step of which you produce the iteration of urban development.
[5:21]
Joanne Leow: Precisely, and I think we just elide it, we’re not even thinking that it could possibly be utopian thinking or fictionalization, you just think, “oh that’s just reality, it’s just going to be reality.”
[5:33]
Jason Wee: Yeah. And what I really find really fascinating about Singapore right now is that they seem to fully, fully embrace it. I mean I don’t know if May told you, because I spoke to her a little bit about it, asking if she’s interested in seeing it, but she did go to the Future Cities Lab, and that’s located within a university environment, but there’s, within the ministry, a center for futurist thinking that’s really just completely anticipatory, predictive, and boldly, nakedly, utopian, like they just…
[6:07]
Joanne Leow: Well, and think about the dystopian literature that’s coming out in tandem—
Jason Wee: (laughing) Yes! Yeah!
Joanne Leow: —with the utopian thinking as a kind of reaction to it, right.
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Jason Wee 3
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Jason Wee explains the thought behind his art installation Labyrinths, with references to choreography, colonisation, and governmental planning., Joanne Leow: The work on Labyrinths—you move then from thinking about space as blurring the line between fictionalization and reality, but also think about borders and fencing. And I found that work really fascinating as well, because earlier as well you were thinking about the material object, “can I gather these material objects?” What were you trying to do in that particular piece when you’re producing this kind of collage effect?
[0:21]
Jason Wee: I think it started for me just really thinking through choreography, and I was thinking a lot about what it means to dance, what it means when someone directs you through a certain kind of movement through space. And partly, maybe because I’ve never been very comfortable thinking of myself as a performer or a dancer, and I’ve tried getting myself involved in dance environments or performance workshops, and hearing this that, you know, we all have our own movements if we just let ourselves into it. But then I walked through the city and realized how I am often not left to my own devices. There are subtle and not-so-subtle infrastructural ways that don’t, in some ways, announce themselves through signs or language, but they really direct your movement; they tell where to cross, not to cross, how to move through streets or even when there are no streets or a field. And I started getting really annoyed, but then I was also thinking, in some ways they, this is a kind of imagined choreography. They did not intend to think of this as kind of movement-related devices but they very much are of a movement vocabulary. So, I then think of the other ways that they begin to shape movement generally. And then the other piece of information that really got me started on putting all the work together was when I found—I don’t know what the Parliamentary records are called here—Hansard? Something like that. And I found that they approved—the Home Affairs, Ministry of Home Affairs—an increase in the budget for coastal fencing to a point where I think we have more coastal fencing than we have shoreline on the main island of Singapore. And these coastal fences are highly defensive. And you know we have, like, 750 odd islands—but they intend to make several of them completely uninhabitable. So, they surround those totally, and actually if you sail to…if you take a southern route to Riau, actually, you will see them, like small islands that only have mangroves or small stands of weeds, that are completely surrounded. The second type that they approve that was highly extended was that they generated these maritime fences—blue barrel buoys, they’re connected by chainmail, but both are meant to prevent—partly to enforce our no refugee policies—the blue barrels are intended to prevent ships from coming close enough where you could swim to shore, or that you could physically land on something, and the same thing with those island fences. And then the final item that they produced was these kinds of stone-base gravel mix that they then generate very very high walls that will not be out of place in, Israel Palestine, I mean, in terms of the materiality of it and the solidity of it, it’ll be like that kind of fence. And those three things plus the fence that I see every day came together in a way that I thought that, there are the fences that we—are already out of sight because they are basic infrastructure, and then there are the fences and borders that constrain our movement and define sovereignty and territory and our sense of citizenship and nation, they’re like completely out of sight because they’re out in the water, or in places that we almost never go to or can never arrive in even if we want to. And I thought: “what are the other moments where I feel space has been constrained” Not discursive space but territorial, physical space have been constrained. Or even the contestation of / for spaces, the demands made of public space have been foreclosed in a certain number of ways, so I started thinking about what happened with Pink Dot last year, with Sungei Road, and with Oxley Road.
[4:28]
Joanne Leow: And so the iterations become almost like—I mean they’re repetitions, they’re echoes of each other—
Jason Wee: Yeah.
Joanne Leow: —because if one thing works in one space then why not replicate it? And, of course, it’s—I think it’s—colonial. You’ve got to rule by segregating, categorizing, labelling, and keeping apart. And nobody wants to think about that but it’s true. Maybe two more questions. One, I’m really interested in, in the fact that you turn to Boey Kim Cheng to think about the coast, and why? You know, you’ve been talking about surveillance, technology, but almost like a brutalist kind of control over regimentation space, but then on the other hand you have this lyric poetry on the other side. So, in your mind, what is that relationship?
[5:12]
Jason Wee: Quickly about the works, you mentioned found objects, but the assemblages, they relate to your early question. I haven’t done a show in Singapore for three years so I wanted to let people know that I’ve been doing a number of different things, but they can come together. So actually, some of the objects were found, but they were mostly fabric. The rest were actually—I fabricated the fence as well as the wood, and there is photography in there as well as watercolour paintings.
Joanne Leow: Yeah, I saw that. They’re really beautiful.
[5:40]
Jason Wee: So, that’s one reason why the works came out that way. Then, I was thinking about creating a large installation that could demonstrate the way that your movement will be shaped by space, through space, without me having to say very much. Like I didn’t want to do the conceptual move where you write about it in a text and then you read it and understand what you’re doing. When I was rereading Kim Cheng’s book again, and this line really popped out where he says, “you move from the coast of remembering to the coast of forgetting.” And I thought that, you know, that path could not possibly be a straight line. You’re likely to move from coast to coast in the way that gets swept by the winds; it’s a zig-zag, it’s labyrinthine in its own way. And then I also found that these…tactile paving that’s used to guide the visually disabled was actually patented in Singapore. So I decided to write that line of Kim Cheng’s verse in Morse Code so that you could actually tap your way and read his work, so to speak, and that even if you can’t read the work, as you move through the space you know that you’re navigated by something that is a code, that’s a linguistic code, you could see that the patterns repeat—don’t quite repeat, or they repeat in ways that suggest vowels or articles.
[7:09]
Joanne Leow: And it’s a space accessible to somebody else not able-bodied.
[7:13]
Jason Wee: Yeah, and then everyone will face an obstacle with the way that the fences are cut and they way they abut the wall; no one will find the exit because I smashed the exit into a wall (laughing).
Joanne Leow: That’s so existential (laughs).
[7:32]
Jason Wee: (laughs) I really have a great deal of difficulty with the production of nostalgia in art and culture here that, for me, it becomes production of an affect that only allows urban development to proceed as it always has, rather than produce counter-movements to it. So, it’s also a reason why I move between these two coasts of remembering and forgetting through that labyrinth, because I’m like, we’re getting lost in it, we’re not finding a way out. I’m not sure nostalgia’s the way to go.
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Jeremy Tiang 1
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Jeremy Tiang talks about his short story "National Day" and why he chose to write from a plural first person POV. He discusses the importance of his characters being migrant workers and how residents of Singapore relate to the islands of Singapore as place (or how they often do not)., Jeremy Tiang: Hi there, I’m Jeremy Tiang. I’m a Singaporean writer and translator.
[0:05]
Jeremy Tiang: I think I wanted to write about an offshore island for awhile, because when you’re living in Singapore it’s very easy to think of it as a city, and then you think of it as being like other cities, but it’s an island. And we forget that, until you get off the coast and then you can’t forget it. And I’d also been wanting to write about construction workers. I mean, that’s a bit of a theme in the book. A number of the stories involve invisible labour, the people who help run Singapore and help build Singapore and aren’t really acknowledged or thought about that much. And the two elements came together very organically when I had the idea of, well what if some of these workers went to this island where they’re not supposed to be. Because when you go to Saint John’s—and I got the ferry out and sort of hung out there for a bit—it was very noticeable that it was a hundred percent middle class Chinese Singaporeans. Even though anyone could go, and a ticket isn’t that expensive to get the boat. It felt a bit like there are these places where only certain classes have the leisure to go, and so a group of construction workers I thought would feel quite out of place there. And many of the stories, I think all of the stories actually, involve people being out of place. So, I often take people and put them where they, in a way don’t belong or don’t feel they belong or don’t feel comfortable, because that’s a really good way to start asking the question, well who gets to belong, who decides who belongs where, and how wide can the boundaries stretch of things like community or country. I wanted to interrogate what would happen if I brought these two things into collision, this group of people and this place. And the story that came out surprised me in some ways. I didn’t expect it to take quite that dark turn at the end but then by the time I got to that point it felt like it couldn’t end any other way.
[2:11]
Joanne Leow: And I noticed that perspective, obviously, is really important in the story, both narrative, obviously because you choose to use that first person plural, but also a spatial perspective, right, because you’ve seen the main island not—in a way that you’ve never seen it, in a sense, before, so could you, can you just talk a little bit more about that?
[2:28]
Jeremy Tiang: Well, about the narrative perspective, I didn’t feel that I could inhabit the voice of a migrant worker. So, I tried to think a way around that; I did a lot of research, and then it still felt like I didn’t have the right to tell that story from that point of view. But a group perspective felt somehow okay—then it’s not an individual and I’m not saying this is what it feels like, it’s more like a group consciousness which felt a bit more like I was able to do it. And for the point of view, that came out of just getting the boat to Saint John’s and realizing that, oh Singapore looks really different from this angle. Everything feels and looks different. It’s still Singapore, but we’re not accustomed to seeing it in this way. The people on the boat were looking ahead and I was looking back at the mainland. We don’t see it from this direction. I guess because I’ve spent so much time outside of Singapore it always feels a little bit unfamiliar to me anyway, but this felt particularly like a way that Singapore doesn’t present itself. There are these iconic pictures of Singapore but they’re always taken from certain angles, and so when you can get outside of that, outside of that framing, then you start to realize that are some aspects of the country that are more hidden away. And I’ve always been interested in ferreting those out.
[3:56]
Joanne Leow: And which specific things that you were thinking of that’ve been hidden away? because one of the things that this project is really interested in is that coastline, that shifting, changing coastline, and your story, you know, is one of the few that looks at that human cost of changing that coastline.
[4:09]
Jeremy Tiang: The pollution, for a start. We don’t really talk about how dirty the waters of Singapore are, but they’re filthy. And we’ve sort of quietly dropped this idea of Singapore as a beach paradise, like you go to Sentosa and that, these designated beach areas where you can swim, but the era of “we’ll all go to East Coast Park and have a picnic and swim in the sea,” that’s quietly gone away, it’s like, no one does that anymore, and it’s kind of dropped from all the iconography, so we’ve lost a lot of that. And I mean that’s partly land reclamation, and partly just the sheer number of ships you see on the horizon. I can’t find any numbers, but I’m pretty sure when I was a kid and we used to go to the beach there were not that many ships and the water was cleaner. I can’t quite express this, but it feels like it’s not really built on a human scale anymore. There’s a lot of elements of the coastline that feel to me like they were built to be photographed or built to be seen but not really lived in or worked in. So, in November I was at the Writers Festival, I was on a panel with a Malaysian writer, and she kept talking about the Stonehenge in Singapore, and I was like what Stonehenge? And she was like “just go outside and turn right.” So, after the panel we did and of course it was the casino and it was the three pillars, the thing on top. That was a really interesting way to look at it. I think she, being Malaysian, maybe saw Singapore for what it is, which is some kind of Fantasia, like she was like, it’s not a real place, she kept saying “this is not a real place.” I think she’s very local in a way Singaporeans aren’t really anymore, like when the moderators said to her, oh you’re a KL writer and she was like “no I live in PJ.” Singapore has become so homogenized that we do not feel territorial in that way. People don’t choose to live anywhere, right, it’s just where you get allocated a flat. And then every neighbourhood looks the same as every other neighbourhood, so we don’t have that sense of belonging. And that’s this thing about the MRT being this circle, and so you sort of ride around on it and wherever you go you’re somewhere on the circle, so you go from Yishun to Orchard or Braddell to Sembawang or whatever, and you’re still going to these same viewpoints, and above every station is a mall with the same shops, but if you can break out of that circle then you’re pretty much on the coast or in the sea, and the whole place starts to look different. And occasionally these places like on Kusu Island or Sisters’ Islands or…I was going to say Sentosa but no.
[6:57]
Joanne Leow: Not Sentosa.
Jeremy Tiang: Not Sentosa, but—and Saint John’s itself, you can see glimpses of what Singapore used to be. Though increasingly that’s going away. I think they’ve cleared all the residents from Pulau Ubin haven’t they?
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Jeremy Tiang 2
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Jeremy Tiang and Joanne Leow discuss how land reclamation has and continues to shape Singapore's boundaries and how capitalism propels this process., Joanne Leow: It’s so interesting to me that the story and the way you’re talking about it, see it in some ways more like an archipelago—more than the dominance of the main island that we’re so accustomed to thinking of. When you were thinking of that story and thinking of going to all those offshore islands, did it change the way you saw—I know you talked about the perspective—did it change the way you saw the totality of what we think of as nation or state?
[0:30]
Jeremy Tiang: I’m interested in the fluidity of Singapore’s identity anyway, I guess. For context, my mom’s Malaysian, and growing up we spent a lot of time in Malaysia, and also we lived in Woodlands, so, in my childhood we went to Johor a lot more than we ever went to Orchard, so I’ve always had this sense of—you know, the idea of Singapore being self-contained quite tenuous anyway, because that wasn’t my upbringing. No, I don’t think it changed the way I saw the totality of Singapore because I’ve always been very interested in how permeable these borders are anyway. And because the borders aren’t fixed—like, as you say, the outline of Singapore has changed so much over time and will continue to change. And it’s manifested in little ways. I mean, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that Beach Road is where the beach used to be, and I was like “oh.”
[1:31]
Joanne Leow: Yeah.
Jeremy Tiang: And that’s really quite a big shift. And I think other people are almost more aware of it than we are ourselves. I’ve an Indonesian friend who, you know, likes to joke that…I think it’s something like “oh, Indonesia used to have 13700 islands and now it’s only 13000 because Singapore took the other 700 for the sand.”
[1:56]
Joanne Leow: And I was just gonna ask you exactly that, actually, because your story investigates that human cost, right, involved in rapid and iconic construction, right, the skyline. But then the other thing about reclamation, to me, in some sense, is kind of occupation by other means. You’re still taking someone’s land whether from the bottom of their riverbed and ruining their coastal ecology there, or denuding their islands and making them disappear. So, I don’t know, I’d just like to get some of your thoughts on that. What do you think of this idea then of land reclamation, which is in some ways almost like a kind of subtext in the story in some ways, I feel, because it’s that kind of taking of the land is tied to taking of the labour.
[2:38]
Jeremy Tiang: Well, I mean, Singapore is far from alone in that. It’s, I guess, the classic first world problem, which is the tendency to believe that you can buy your way out of anything. So, the rich Americans who believe they can buy any level of healthcare and want to live forever basically, are no different to Singapore believing that it can continue expanding indefinitely, and, just, there’s no limit to how much you can reclaim, there’s no limit to how far we can push out the borders. So, it’s, I guess, it’s a kind of hubris. Not accepting that there are limits, and continually pushing outward. And yeah, we don’t really talk about how we extract all kinds of resources—human, land, natural—from our neighbours. There’s a lot of talk about ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] and ASEAN cooperation and being part of the community, but coming from a Singapore perspective it almost seems like a willful blindness, a way of rearranging the region to suit us, like we’re all one big happy family rather than Singapore as a hegemonic power within the region. And we distort a lot of things. You can’t really go, “we’re all so happy, cooperating and being a community” when Singapore has so much more wealth than our neighbours, and therefore calls the shots in many ways.
[4:19]
Joanne Leow: And wealth that’s also actually in some senses constructed by labouring bodies from our regional neighbours.
[4:26]
Jeremy Tiang: Yes. I mean, it’s a vicious circle. We have more money, so we can attract more people, and then we pay them pretty much nothing. So, we continue to become wealthier and they continue to become poorer, and the greater the difference is the longer we can get away with paying them nothing.
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Jeremy Tiang 3
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Jeremy Tiang talks about the social and status stratification within Singapore and how the government enforces certain boundaries between various people in relation to his depictions of migrant workers in "National Day.", Jeremy Tiang: I was drawing from traditional art, which is also referenced in the cover of one of the Epigram books, I think it’s Pongulu, where the sea is depicted as little triangles, and then that I think shows up in quite a bit of Malay art, where it’s a very stylized depiction of the water. But, when I was on the boat going to Saint John’s island, I looked out, it kind of did look like that. The waves were really startlingly regular, and I thought “oh, so maybe it’s not stylized maybe they’re just drawing what they saw,” but because we don’t go out that much and look at the water in that way—you look at the water from shore, you don’t look at it often from the boat—we aren’t aware of that way of looking at things. And also, with the defamiliarization, that’s something that I found…because I’ve been around Sentosa, I got to go into a couple of those fancy houses because through a bizarre series of circumstances I ended up acting in a property ad. I was taking a series of very weird jobs while I was writing my first book, and one of the jobs, because I could play the cello, was to be Yo-Yo Ma’s body double in this ad they were doing for Sentosa Cove. So I basically had to sit in these houses, and they filmed in all the different rooms, and I just sat there playing my cello, and they were going to dub in Yo-Yo Ma and film him for the real thing, but…
[1:34]
Joanne Leow: That’s incredibly surreal.
Jeremy Tiang: Oh it was amazing.
Joanne Leow: (laughs).
Jeremy Tiang: I’ll write another story about that someday.
Joanne Leow: I think you need to.
[1:42]
Jeremy Tiang: But that allowed me to see inside of these houses and see what the development was like, and yet when I was on the boat it took me a long time to realize that I was looking at the same houses, because from the other side, from the water side where they’re not designed to be looked at, they’re kind of scruffy. They’re not beautiful, and they look like—it’s like, oh so people actually do live there. And their backyards, they don’t bother making it look nice, and they just leave the kids’ toys out or whatever. And I was like, on one hand it’s quite heartening that even very rich people are still normal and like, still have scruffy back gardens, but on the other it was something about the contrast between how ostentatious the front of those houses were, and how unrecognizable they look from the back, that made me think, well, what is this? Like what is this lifestyle where ultimately you’re just living like a regular person? But then there’s also the need—and it feels like that’s where most of the money goes, right, it’s the ostentatious upkeep of the front of the house, and like that exclusive address, and that manicured front lawn, but actually the bit you spend most of your time in might be bigger, but it’s really no different to anyone living in an HDB flat.
[2:59]
Joanne Leow: And I love the description of how that switch happened but also the abstract and concrete that you were talking about with the sea. One of the last questions I have is that extract on 162 when, they start to threaten to call the police and call the coast guard and turn this into a particular kind of space, and the ending as well in particular when he just leaves and he just goes into the water and starts swimming. What were you trying to express about that space, then? That kind of almost liminal space between sand and water but mainland and offshore island? Something about power, I think, really struck me.
[3:36]
Jeremy Tiang: I think it was about defining who gets to be in what spaces. Like, it’s this island that feels like no one lives there and who cares and it’s free for all, but actually there are all these rules, and in fact you aren’t allowed to be there overnight unless you’re in this government sanctioned camp. And around the time I was writing it there were a lot of—I mean this is something that comes up again and again—but there’d been a spate of stories about void decks, and foreign workers not being allowed to congregate in void decks, and it’s like well hang on, these are public spaces where everyone’s allowed, so how can you not allow a certain group of people? And there’s all kinds of stories I’ve heard, like a number of my friends who live in condos say that, “oh maids aren’t allowed to use the pool,” and it’s like a) they all seem okay with that, which is really weird to me, but also b) I don’t know how you necessarily tell someone’s status, unless you live in a very unequal society where it’s immediately obvious whether you’re a house-owner or a maid. I don’t think it can just be a question of nationality or appearance, it’s something about bearing, it’s something about…the way Singaporeans carry themselves is with a certain amount of entitlement that makes it very obvious who belongs in certain places. And I think I’ve been away from Singapore for long enough that I’ve lost a bit of that, so there have been times when people have been like, “should you be here,” and it’s like okay, that’s interesting. Because, of course, you see that everywhere, right? You see who’s welcome in certain public spaces here as well. Most rich nations…there has to be a redefining of the word “public” because we want to exclude certain groups of people whilst pretending we’re not doing it, so we do it very quietly. And I think, if I remember right, I wrote that not long after the Little India so-called riots, which made me think a lot about who’s allowed to express themselves, and particularly—well, what else is going to happen? If you don’t give people a way to speak out in any other way then of course they’re going to set cars on fire in the streets. But we act as if this is some terrible thing…like, well, what do you expect them to do? Are they going to write a letter to the Straits Times forum page, would the Straits Times publish it, you know, what can they do? And it’s something that we’ve seen since then, in a lot of places around the world, that if you render people powerless, then they’ll find a way to take power back by force. And that’s a lesson that Singapore doesn’t appear to be learning. At least in this story, in a small way, there are tiny acts of rebellion, and it’s, on one hand, not going to change anything, but on the other hand I think that describes most of life. Like we just negotiate with our own, the spaces we’re in, and we maybe enlarge them a little bit but very very few people actually take actions big enough to have major change. And I think…I had written a wish fulfillment version of this story where they did manage to defeat the bureaucracy and did manage to claim a bit of power back, but then I thought, actually that never happens. On the very few occasions when we even hear from foreign workers, like the—again the bus drivers so-called illegal strike, they’re very quickly clamped down on and punished and then nothing changes. So, I wanted to express futility and powerlessness and, I think, the way to do that is by showing these invisible boundaries suddenly becoming visible. And it’s like an electric fence when you realize it’s electric; it’s like, oh, okay, so actually that’s happening, actually, I thought I had a certain amount of freedom, but if I choose to try to exercise it then I realize that I don’t. And Singaporeans, whilst being much more privileged, actually suffer from a similar version of this, where you think you can do certain things and then you, for instance, write a Facebook post that’s set to ‘friends only’ and then you find yourself being charged.
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Jeremy Tiang Reading An Excerpt from "National Day"
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Author Jeremy Tiang reads an excerpt from "National Day". In this short story, Tiang comments on issues of nationality, economy, class, and the ecology that brings to light the complex reality of Singaporean spaces.
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Jordan Abel Interview 1
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In this clip, Jordan Abel discusses his relationship to Vancouver as a place and how his family histories and traumas are tied to Vancouver and the legacy of colonial violence. He discusses the placement of Indigenous art throughout Vancouver (and the totem poles in Stanley Park in particular) and the complexities around displaying Indigenous art and tradition in such a public space, weighing accessibility against voyeurism., Jordan Abel: My name is Jordan Abel. I’m a Nisga’a writer from BC. The main geography for me in The Place of Scraps, I think, is Vancouver as a city, in part because I was born there, but also in part because I never live there and had to return there as an adult in this place that, in many ways, I felt like I was supposed to feel very intimately familiar with those spaces, particularly in the ways that I’d heard about my parents navigating those spaces, but also coming to it, you know, as a stranger, unfamiliar with that geography. The other spaces that I think about a lot in this work are the spaces that exist for Indigenous forms of art in the city of Vancouver, in particular, like, the way that Indigenous art seems to be strategically positioned within the city, and what that says about the function of Indigenous arts and the pathway that Indigenous artists are attempting to navigate.
(1:12)
Joanne Leow: I, I mean, I think I want to skip to this question first, because this—what you said about pathways and about the place of Indigenous art, and also the kind of negotiations that you have to make with the—and sometimes a very transactional nature, right, of how art is treated in cities, in a sense. One of the pages of the book that really struck me, again, is that “Please stay out of Totem Pole Area” part of Place of Scraps, which really made me think about who’s in control of the art, who’s in control of that space, thinking about the governmentality of it, and thinking about how your book tries to almost, in some senses, wrest back control. What is the meaning of the art in the space, what is the meaning of the totem pole in the space, what is the meaning of the space just generally, right? So yeah, I’d love to hear more about what struck you when you took that photo, and how you sort of came to incorporate it in your work.
(1:59)
Jordan Abel: I think the first thing, as an intergenerational survivor of residential schools, and as, as a person who grew up severed from my Indigenous community, I think encountering those totem poles in that way with that sign that says “Please stay out of the Totem Pole Area,” I think is…that particular moment and photograph felt like a microcosm of my experience of Indigeneity, and, you know, seemed to run in parallel to the legacies of colonial violence that disrupt Indigenous forms of knowledge and art from generation to generation. That’s one way that I think about it. You know, I think the other way that I think about that space is I guess, through the city of Vancouver’s, I guess, intentions to display Indigeneity in Stanley Park, which is an area that (laughing), you know, I think is a really complicated area because the Indigenous peoples who originally occupied that space were of course forcibly removed from that area, but the park itself really has this—like there’s this really kind of complicated line that it walks, you know, where it wants to present itself as this kind of natural, untouched space that was there before…that mythical before Indigenous peoples. There’s this myth of preservation, I think, that surrounds that park, and to have that area specifically to say, “okay, here’s this selection of totem poles that we’ve curated to represent the complex history, the complex artistic traditions of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific-Northwest in like fifteen poles” (laughing) or something, that is so complicated. And that space is further complicated, I think, you know, by the fact that it's a tourist spot, you know, every time I’m there, there’s—they actually have, there’s a parking lot right outside that space where there’s the enormous long parking spots that are for tour buses, and those buses stop there all the time, and there’s constantly people just showing up and taking pictures. It’s very much part of the cultural tourism that Vancouver is interested in, and I wonder about my own place in relation to that kind of tourism and to the kind of gaze that those poles are subjected to, and I wonder about my relationship to those poles and how I should interact with them and be present there in that space, or not be.
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