Intertidal Polyphonies

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: Cavenagh Bridge 1; Trees and buildings along the river. Cavenagh Bridge on the right.

: Cavenagh Bridge 2; First Generation sculpture. Children preparing to jump into the river.

: Cecily Nicholson Clip 1; Nicholson touches on topics such as space, history, and poetics by discussing her own experiences working in art and writing., Cecily Nicholson: So, my name is Cecily Nicholson. Currently, at my place of employment where I am the interpretive programmer for the Surrey Art Gallery in the city of Surrey. I have worked for years in Arts administration, but I think I’m a part of this conversation today because I’m also a poet and a writer. And involved in arts organising and community-based works. I think it is generally an aspect of my methodology; the way I think through an approach to writing, is that I am concerned about place. And I am constantly trying to explicate my own complicity or relationship to that material existence, as well as the history of it. And possibly a future. So yeah, so it’s sort of an intuitive or an instinctual thing for me to think like that already. From the Poplars, I started off that project in a couple different ways. One is that I’m on foot. I’m a very avid walker. I feel like both in my life as a matter of wellness and grounding I just have to be out on land even in an urban context. In addition, it’s also just how I learn a place. So, the ways in which you can learn by driving and being in transit and people telling you stories or reading and all of these things, but I really don’t feel like I ever quite learn a place until I’m actually boots on the ground, as it were, not in a military sense but in a, sort of just experiential sense. And so I do a lot of walking. The island my partner and I noticed years ago, living in New West Minster, has the strange—it’s not strange inherently in and of itself—but it struck us as strange because it was this quiet, unindustrialised, seemingly unindustrialised, seemingly untouched or uninhabited, unused space in a highly industrialised major city. Major as part of the lower mainland kind of complex but major in the history of British Columbia as well, or the formation of British Columbia, the occupation of British Columbia and so on through to the gold rush. So, it has this, the mouth of the Fraser, as it were, we’re just shy of the ocean there, in this very particular nexus and there’s this space, this 23.5 acres of basically trees. So, curiosity, I suppose. But also, just like a call. Not in a religious sense per se, but maybe in a creative sense, maybe in a you know ancient historical sense; the ways in which we’re compelled to pay attention to things about our natural world. That beautiful mountain, that significant tree, that body of water, or whatever it is. So, I felt called to pay attention more and more, and then began sort of working through the human record of it. Trying to listen for the human story of it, which lead me to archives, lead me to thinking through the industry of the area. Obviously trying to think through to a pre-colonial and non-colonial pre-European settlement or moment of occupation. Trying to understand if indigenous relationship or history relative to the space as well, but not necessarily starting there because it wasn’t apparent, and it was actually quite difficult to access or think through how to make those connections. So yeah, it started, it started because of that. And so a combination of interest and call and curiosity but also a sense of wanting to engage in a project at a time—and I’ve talked about this before—but listening to people. Lots of people, but Sarah Hunt stands out in the local context, because I was listening to a talk of hers—her reminding or encouraging us to think through the history of the land beneath our feet and the land beneath the city and what it might mean for a practice of poetics to try to work through those multi-scale meanings and contexts and what is my responsibility, potentially, to that moment. 4:28 JL: Can we talk a little bit more about the poetics, then? There’s something that poetry gives us or enables a form of thinking or a form of seeing that the text is trying to access. Can you talk a bit about the difficulty or the challenges or perhaps the pleasure even of translating that relief-complex-fragmented-fragmentary history both of the land and the human archive as well, the difficulty of getting that? Can you talk a bit more about what that process is like? 5:00 CN: I enjoy it for the most part. I think of it as study and I think of it as a slow accumulation, less in a capitalist sense, but more in a robust—growing or robust understanding or knowledge. I do enjoy it—ultimately, I enjoy it. What’s challenging about it—there’s several things that are challenging about it, and I’ll get to the question of poetics, I guess, but the challenge for me is I do not enjoy the “I” figure. I really am quite challenged by it. You know, coming out of teenage years or as a child writing poetry instinct—you know always putting the “I” figure, “I think this,” “I do that,” “I see this,” and that authority, you know, not really being very critical about that at all. I had some very good lessons from teachers and other writers to start to think through just the problems of the individual. The problems of the individual individuating kind of aspects of our cultural experiences, our capital, our economy experience, economic experience, and the ways in which that’s reinforced in academia, and the art world, and literary world. The figure. So, I do find it challenging to come to poetics without being overly engrossed with my own perspective. But at the same time, being thoughtful about the necessity of not erasing my presence, both as a matter of responsibility, so of course I’m here, of course I’m having an impact, just like all of us collectively are. I have some degree of power it’s important to to to understand that and to not give it away unnecessarily, and if I do how and why. What good reasons are there to do that? And then also what is my relationship to a sense of people? “My people.” Even if it’s “my people” in an ancestral sense or maybe it’s “my people” in terms of class sense or a labour sense or the multiple confluences and intersections that have resulted in my presence where I am these days, so what is my relationship to that and do I want to erase that either? That challenge of coming through and thinking through the “I” while I’m engaged in study was a back and forth throughout the whole text and it wasn’t fully resolved at all but to some degree found some harmony (I hope) in the outcome of that book project. And so, indeed, the work moves in sections through different ways of observing, some of which centre my individual concerns and others which obscure or make complicit as part of systemic observations that presence.

: Cecily Nicholson Clip 2; In this second clip of the interview, Nicholson touches on topics such as space, colonial history, poetry, and settler language. The discussion then shifts to comment on language use—in particular thinking of the language used in regards to the non-human elements of space., JL: When you’re thinking of non-indigenous and yet non-white space, especially in this sort of really fraught zone that we know of as Vancouver. What do you think, and you spoke of responsibility but also about having certain forms of power that you obviously want to use in ways, for the good, and you were saying “the people.” What kinds of complexities do you think still need to be thought through or that you’re still sort of thinking through when we think about you know sort of diasporic and indigenous solidarities in this space. Especially through artistic production, cultural production, literary production, in ways that balance that kind of that colonial history. 0:45 CN: Well, and I think that’s, those are really important questions. In a fraught context, maybe not the lower mainland, but in North America, turtle island, you know, globally. We’re not gonna escape these / any context geographically or relative to a nation state or municipal province. So that said, I feel like I carry this no matter where I am. We carry it. This moment is important. I think we’re at a rapid—what is it? I don’t want to say growth or development because these words are all co-opted, but strengthening of our, I’m gonna say discourse and our language, and I mean so much more than that and the materiality, but I see the ways in which we’re talking and relating is shifting. Collective we. I’m saying, just in the realm of cultural production, say even just in the realm of poetry and poetry writing. We have an interest in... I mean, we use language like “decolonisation.” I’m also very interested in the anti-colonial and I want to think through also the non-colonial and think through all those kinds of examples or methodologies as possibly existing in many occasions without me being present. So, I want to support spaces and projects and agency and autonomy that may exclude me as well. However, in many ways, in many intersections, it needs to include me and that history or that trajectory I was talking about in terms of ancestry, because our histories are entwined relative to these systems of colonisation, imperialism, and capitalism. We’re entwined in ways that we understand increasingly that might be necessary to continue to be entwined in our collaborations if we are to truly dismantle some of these structures. Collaboration, we can’t demand it, we can’t simply be present as allies and have that sort of line up with what “let’s get together and do this.” It’s not something I direct, it’s something we work on collectively with agreement or not, or with agreement, rather, or we don’t work on it. I think that the particular experience for a black, and in my case, it’s a convoluted sort of realisation of black identity, definitely I understand and think about it in terms of diasporic experience. I think of it as um cultural and an integral legacy for me in terms of existence and survival. I think of it in terms of economy and our relationship to political economy and the long-standing outcomes of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So, in doing, and just a very careful observation of the difference between, um, what an immigration experience might be, what a migrant experience might be, what is a non-status migrant experience and so on. And what is the experience of being the descendants of slaves? So, forced—not just forced migrations, not strong enough language—enslavement of people who have been enslaved. Has been foundational to the foundations of the nation state, including Canada absolutely. And all our colonial relations globally, so here we are. So, it’s really important for me, personally, to think that through and to not set that aside and think of it as being subsumed in a broad category of “settler.” And so, it’s less the indigenous / non-indigenous that I’m focused on. I think what I’m agitated by at this current moment is assumptions and projections of a broad notion of “settler,” particularly if that comes from non-black and non-indigenous community. So, um and I would say especially when it comes with privileges of white passing, class, status, and um great mobility, socially, and political and cultural mobility. Which many many many peoples do not have. So, when it comes from those positions of power, and so, for example, in academia—is very adept at talking about lots of things around settler colonialism—somehow is failing still to really understand a broad vision of what a settler—an anti-settler colonialism would actually entail. Because it must entail other colonised bodies, both as complicit and as subject, and of course it would spill out beyond the black or African decent experience of people who have black or African descent. For sure, so there’s more to think about there as well. But for my own, I’ll speak just to my own experience and for me it is an absolutely isolating problem, um and that problem is heightened back to the nation-state, back to this region and back to Vancouver. It’s heightened here. Because anti-blackness and anti-black racism in Vancouver is insidious and very much unresolved. 5:58 JL: That’s a great response to that. Clearly a very difficult question to think through [CN and JL talk over top each other about this being difficult to think through]. I mean, I really appreciate the kind of specificity of the language and the histories that you’re bringing into that response, and one of the things that I really love about your work, um, is you manage to weave through that thinking or that processing with an extremely specific language about the landscape that you find yourself surrounded in, particularly in the text. And I would love to hear you speak more about that. To think about that language of place the specificity of words identifying particular kinds of non-human aspects of the plants, of the materiality of that space, and I was really interested in thinking, in wanting to ask you how in your mind has that come through as well? So, you’re thinking about this sort of really complicated and painful and difficult human history of colonisation and occupation in the lower mainland and Vancouver, but then you’re also thinking of these really non-human elements, these plants, these animals, these the rocks, the water. And how does that, in your mind—how do those things fit together for you? 7:17 CN: Well, they just do, for starters. So, it’s kind of the magic of existence that somehow, you know—repairing ecology, for example, is of course present simultaneous to massive shipping industry and the paper mill factory. It’s all there, still. And for me it is a kind of magic in a long sense of it and I would say in terms of a profoundly grounding sense and it directly relates to poetry and the reasons why for poetry from a young age, for me, there’s an opportunity to see or to take what I observe in the sensory relative to the non-human and to heighten that awareness because it’s been integral to my existence, my survival, and all of my continuation. I do not find—I could not find fullness in terms of joy if I didn’t have that grounding in the quote unquote natural world—the language fails us. [JL “yes” laughing]. And that is a problem and also why poetry, the language does fail us, and so, I am embedded and entrenched in my thinking, and world views as informed by the English language. That is a deep and psychological and, you know, unextractable thing for me. So, um poetry does become an opportunity to really start to break down and engage in a different way than the regular syntax of everyday economy and life allows us to do. But it’s also a kind of adhesive or glue or continuity that creates. So when you’re working through the stutter scales of economy, industry, human settlement, or um you know, when you’re looking at these kind of systematic or systems, it would be a—I think almost a terrible project to read the book that just studies that. I mean, I have a long history in terms of my education, I did a lot of studies relative to political economy and economics and business and these kinds of broad views, and I really value thinking like that and that kind of knowledge. But at the end of the day, I can’t think like that or write like that and feel um thorough in being, in what I’m witnessing, I guess. And I am interested in what makes us, not just what makes us engage, but also what makes us thrive. For me, art and poetics is an aspect of that help me thrive. There is beauty, all the time. It’s always present. And when it’s not, maybe beauty is one of those words like nature—what am I actually saying?—things that are astounding or extraordinary or heartbreaking, the simplest of things, like the salmon run—which is not happening in the north arm of the Fraser, by the way—but just there’s these intense emotional connections to just the regular cycles of the world for me, and so, if there’s any way to help to think through language and help connect that to other people, collectively to readers or other poets or whatever it is, then um I’ve lucked out in terms of what my practice might be doing.

: Cecily Nicholson Clip 3; In this final clip, Nicholson concludes her discussion on settler-colonialism and language use., JL: I just have one very small question to follow. You spoke about altering the syntax of a very colonial language that we’re still using at the moment to communicate and everything. Just a little bit more about that. When you’re engaging in that process and that writing of that effort of trying to sort of build, almost, relation through language, you were saying, but also to build a particular kind of perspective, and you were talking about the complications of embodied “I,” but what’s that like? Does English still resist in some ways, and then how do you sort of go about really literally sort of decolonising the very sort of terms that we’re using? 0:43 CN: Trying. So, part of it can be simply practical things of around how we juxtapose language and so we may be creating meaning or alternate meanings, or we might be um revealing more about the context or the meaning of something. There’s no innocent words. We can do things with how we place them that heighten and highlight elements that we’d like to have brought out, so that’s just a practical thing. We can reduce and undermine language too, and make it silly, we can make it selfish, we can do things that make, show, and reveal its tendencies. We can work with sound and rhythm and for me, and I’ve learned this more in my more recent book project, but um, really really giving over to um motion and movement, sound, rhythm, as a device I suppose, or kind of a formal thing, but also as a freeing thing, because it’s different from what language does. Which is not to say that when we speak, you know, we do have rhythms and cadences, it’s necessary, part of how we hear each other, there’s lots of connotations and the ways in which we use language that is inflected with sound and volume and tone and how we you know but um that can get more and more deliberate, or we try to get more and more deliberate in the context of poetry, and you do believe it has some power that maybe supersedes the actual meaning and formality of just expository language.

: Cecily Nicholson Clip 3; In the final clip of the interview, the discussion focuses on the topic of language. Nicholson comments on the complex relationship between language and knowing and how she uses this relationship in the context of poetry., JL: I just have one very small question to follow. You spoke about altering the syntax of a very colonial language that we’re still using at the moment to communicate and everything. Just a little bit more about that. When you’re engaging in that process and that writing of that effort of trying to sort of build, almost, relation through language, you were saying, but also to build a particular kind of perspective, and you were talking about the complications of embodied “I,” but what’s that like? Does English still resist in some ways, and then how do you sort of go about really literally sort of decolonising the very sort of terms that we’re using? 0:43 CN: Trying. So, part of it can be simply practical things of around how we juxtapose language and so we may be creating meaning or alternate meanings, or we might be um revealing more about the context or the meaning of something. There’s no innocent words. We can do things with how we place them that heighten and highlight elements that we’d like to have brought out, so that’s just a practical thing. We can reduce and undermine language too, and make it silly, we can make it selfish, we can do things that make, show, and reveal its tendencies. We can work with sound and rhythm and for me, and I’ve learned this more in my more recent book project, but um, really really giving over to um motion and movement, sound, rhythm, as a device I suppose, or kind of a formal thing, but also as a freeing thing, because it’s different from what language does. Which is not to say that when we speak, you know, we do have rhythms and cadences, it’s necessary, part of how we hear each other, there’s lots of connotations and the ways in which we use language that is inflected with sound and volume and tone and how we you know but um that can get more and more deliberate, or we try to get more and more deliberate in the context of poetry, and you do believe it has some power that maybe supersedes the actual meaning and formality of just expository language.

: Cecily Nicholson Interview: Clip 1; Cecily Nicholson talks about her role in art--in particular her concern with space. The conversation then shifts to a discussion on poetics. Nicholson discusses the complex relationship between individuality and collectivity and how she confronts it within her own work., Cecily Nicholson: So, my name is Cecily Nicholson. Currently, at my place of employment where I am the interpretive programmer for the Surrey Art Gallery in the city of Surrey. I have worked for years in Arts administration, but I think I’m a part of this conversation today because I’m also a poet and a writer. And involved in arts organising and community-based works. I think it is generally an aspect of my methodology; the way I think through an approach to writing, is that I am concerned about place. And I am constantly trying to explicate my own complicity or relationship to that material existence, as well as the history of it. And possibly a future. So yeah, so it’s sort of an intuitive or an instinctual thing for me to think like that already. From the Poplars, I started off that project in a couple different ways. One is that I’m on foot. I’m a very avid walker. I feel like both in my life as a matter of wellness and grounding I just have to be out on land even in an urban context. In addition, it’s also just how I learn a place. So, the ways in which you can learn by driving and being in transit and people telling you stories or reading and all of these things, but I really don’t feel like I ever quite learn a place until I’m actually boots on the ground, as it were, not in a military sense but in a, sort of just experiential sense. And so I do a lot of walking. The island my partner and I noticed years ago, living in New West Minster, has the strange—it’s not strange inherently in and of itself—but it struck us as strange because it was this quiet, unindustrialised, seemingly unindustrialised, seemingly untouched or uninhabited, unused space in a highly industrialised major city. Major as part of the lower mainland kind of complex but major in the history of British Columbia as well, or the formation of British Columbia, the occupation of British Columbia and so on through to the gold rush. So, it has this, the mouth of the Fraser, as it were, we’re just shy of the ocean there, in this very particular nexus and there’s this space, this 23.5 acres of basically trees. So, curiosity, I suppose. But also, just like a call. Not in a religious sense per se, but maybe in a creative sense, maybe in a you know ancient historical sense; the ways in which we’re compelled to pay attention to things about our natural world. That beautiful mountain, that significant tree, that body of water, or whatever it is. So, I felt called to pay attention more and more, and then began sort of working through the human record of it. Trying to listen for the human story of it, which lead me to archives, lead me to thinking through the industry of the area. Obviously trying to think through to a pre-colonial and non-colonial pre-European settlement or moment of occupation. Trying to understand if indigenous relationship or history relative to the space as well, but not necessarily starting there because it wasn’t apparent, and it was actually quite difficult to access or think through how to make those connections. So yeah, it started, it started because of that. And so a combination of interest and call and curiosity but also a sense of wanting to engage in a project at a time—and I’ve talked about this before—but listening to people. Lots of people, but Sarah Hunt stands out in the local context, because I was listening to a talk of hers—her reminding or encouraging us to think through the history of the land beneath our feet and the land beneath the city and what it might mean for a practice of poetics to try to work through those multi-scale meanings and contexts and what is my responsibility, potentially, to that moment. 4:28 JL: Can we talk a little bit more about the poetics, then? There’s something that poetry gives us or enables a form of thinking or a form of seeing that the text is trying to access. Can you talk a bit about the difficulty or the challenges or perhaps the pleasure even of translating that relief-complex-fragmented-fragmentary history both of the land and the human archive as well, the difficulty of getting that? Can you talk a bit more about what that process is like? 5:00 CN: I enjoy it for the most part. I think of it as study and I think of it as a slow accumulation, less in a capitalist sense, but more in a robust—growing or robust understanding or knowledge. I do enjoy it—ultimately, I enjoy it. What’s challenging about it—there’s several things that are challenging about it, and I’ll get to the question of poetics, I guess, but the challenge for me is I do not enjoy the “I” figure. I really am quite challenged by it. You know, coming out of teenage years or as a child writing poetry instinct—you know always putting the “I” figure, “I think this,” “I do that,” “I see this,” and that authority, you know, not really being very critical about that at all. I had some very good lessons from teachers and other writers to start to think through just the problems of the individual. The problems of the individual individuating kind of aspects of our cultural experiences, our capital, our economy experience, economic experience, and the ways in which that’s reinforced in academia, and the art world, and literary world. The figure. So, I do find it challenging to come to poetics without being overly engrossed with my own perspective. But at the same time, being thoughtful about the necessity of not erasing my presence, both as a matter of responsibility, so of course I’m here, of course I’m having an impact, just like all of us collectively are. I have some degree of power it’s important to to to understand that and to not give it away unnecessarily, and if I do how and why. What good reasons are there to do that? And then also what is my relationship to a sense of people? “My people.” Even if it’s “my people” in an ancestral sense or maybe it’s “my people” in terms of class sense or a labour sense or the multiple confluences and intersections that have resulted in my presence where I am these days, so what is my relationship to that and do I want to erase that either? That challenge of coming through and thinking through the “I” while I’m engaged in study was a back and forth throughout the whole text and it wasn’t fully resolved at all but to some degree found some harmony (I hope) in the outcome of that book project. And so, indeed, the work moves in sections through different ways of observing, some of which centre my individual concerns and others which obscure or make complicit as part of systemic observations that presence.

: Changi Airport 1; Wall of plants near the baggage claim.

: Changi Airport 2; Wall of plants near baggage claim.

: Charles Lim 1; Charles Lim recounts childhood experiences that helped shape his engagements with the sea in his SEA STATE projects., Charles Lim: My name is Charles Lim, Charles Lim Yi Yong. I am an artist. [0:06] Joanne Leow: I guess I just want to start talking about SEA STATE first. Maybe to ask a general question: you’ve been working on it for over a decade now, or you were saying since you were a child you’ve been thinking about these ideas. Charles Lim: Yeah. Joanne Leow: What’s that like, to engage in a project that has such a long duration? [0:20] Charles Lim: Actually when I was an artist I didn’t really think of doing it. In fact, I was kind of running away from this sea thing because I grew up around the sea, and then, you know, my father actually has a close connection to the sea. He’s a kind of a self-taught sailor. I think I spent more time in the water than on land in some sense, actually. So, there are many, kind of like, layers of how I engage with the sea, in a sense. Actually I lived—I grew up—in this village called Mata Ikan, which was kind of like a village kampong, actually, that was by the sea. But by the time I was there, when I was born, the sea was not there actually, it was actually reclaimed land. It was actually…you know, I was living in this house and my grandmother was making paint for, this whitewash paint for—not really paint, and there was a pile of seashells in front of the house, and she would take it and then she would burn it, and then the ashes would be mixed with some liquid and then she would make these like, whitewash paint for people to buy. So, I grew up seeing that, actually. And then she had this small little shrine temple to the goddess of the sea, and I was living there and…what was interesting was that when I was growing up there was this land, kind of like desert space, right in front of me. So, I never saw it as the industrial, to me it’s like, just the space that I grew up. And then I remember trying to get to the sea, and I would walk across the desert, and then, I think it took me something like an hour to get… [1:59] Joanne Leow: And that was the land that was being settled, right, they need to settle it— Charles Lim: Yeah, that was, yeah. Joanne Leow: —before they can build anything on it. [2:03] Charles Lim: Yeah, I think those days they would take something like four years. So there was this space of just nothing happening. But later on, I found out there actually was things happening while they were waiting, actually. I remember—but my experience was the going to the sea, and then, you know, it’s like, living at kampong, and then, you know, we had all this…myths and stories around water. Basically, mainly to scare children from getting into the water, the whole ju gui [water spirit] thing, you know. 2:34 Joanne Leow: So you don’t drown. Charles Lim: But then as a kid you want to fight against that, also. So, I always ended up playing in drains, longkangs, and then going to the sea. I remember going to the shoreline and then there would be a granite shore because they had to use the granite to fortify the shore. And then, you know, I’ll pick up woods from—pieces of wood, and my friend, and then we’d build a little hut. It’s kind of like a childhood fantasy—I think most kids have it—a kind of home away from home. So, I’d build a hut there and then go back home and then a few days later I’ll come back to that hut. [3:06] Joanne Leow: And so this is the ‘80s? Charles Lim: Yeah, this was in the ‘80s… Joanne Leow: ‘70s, ‘80s? [3:12] Charles Lim: ‘70s, ‘80s. So I was very young then, and I grew up there, and my father was like, self-taught sailing enthusiast. He joined the yacht club in Changi, which was started by, I think it was like, RAF [Royal Air Force] and NCOs [Singapore Air Force Non-Commissioned Officers’ Club], actually. And, the club was very quiet, I remember. And then he made me sail, he loved sailing. Actually I remember not liking it, but then what happened was that once I went on this sailing class where they put me in the boat, and I was able to steer the boat wherever I could, I found it really liberating, actually. Then I kind of got hooked onto it. But I was not really into competitive sailing at that point in time. So, you know, I would go to races, and then I would come in last all the time, I wouldn’t care, and I would frustrate my father. But then what happened was that, actually, when I was like, around twelve years old, I had a growth spurt, I became quite big. I was almost the same size as I am now, yeah. And then what happened was that there was a coach and he saw that I was so big, and basically what happened was that I was kind of like groomed and trained to become a crew. So, I’m not—so, what happened was I became connected with very competitive sailing, but I wasn’t the person that was steering the boat, I was the person that was like the helper on the boat. So, I was racing on boats that maybe have two people on board. And then through that, actually, I got onto the national team, and then I started doing a lot of competitive sailing. And then at some point in time I was like, training for the Olympics, so I was doing that. So what happens is that, yeah I was sailing in the sea a lot, racing in the sea, around Changi actually, in this area called Seafix, around Loyang… [4:57] Joanne Leow: Pasir Ris, and… Charles Lim: …around this area also between Ubin and Tekong. Joanne Leow: Yeah. Charles Lim: And also there are these races around Ubin… Joanne Leow: So quite a closed area, actually. Charles Lim: Quite a close area, yeah. And then the Johor Lama also, because during that time, I think, the border was still quite like…you know, you could just… Joanne Leow: Low-key. Charles Lim: …you could actually just take a sailing boat and go across, go into the kampong. Joanne Leow: Not anymore. Charles Lim: You can’t do that anymore. Joanne Leow: No. [5:20] Charles Lim: I used to do that all the time, actually. This one time I think I was supposed to race around Ubin, and being the non-competitive person I was…all my friends were racing around and then I would actually stop and then go to Johor, walk around (laughs), then I’d get on the boat and then continue to race. And then I remember I got, like, scolding for that, “why the hell did you do that?” So I was really exploring, actually.

: Charles Lim 2; Charles Lim discusses what he thinks the purpose of visual art is and how visual arts intersect with invisible forces (such as The Foreshores Act)., Charles Lim: So, there’s a certain kind of tension between stories and reality, actually. And for me it’s very important to engage with the real, because we live in a real place, you know, there’s physics involved, and… [0:12] Joanne Leow: Materials, and states, yeah, for sure. So, I mean, the stories you’ve been telling me, yeah… Charles Lim: So it’s not—everything is like, you know, just because a guy says so it’s real. [0:22] Joanne Leow: Yeah. So, in a sense, the stories that you’ve been telling me also make me think that that’s why SEA STATE is zero to nine. There are just so many different elements that you’re trying to bring together in the work, I mean, can you talk a little bit more about why the project has so many different mediums? Like, what were you… why were you working in so many different mediums, what were you trying to achieve? You started out painting, that’s your trade, but… [0:44] Charles Lim: I think, I believe as an artist, actually, that art is a really limited medium. I think it’s very limited. Maybe even more limited than theater or film, actually, because film you can—you have a narrative, actually, and you build something, and then you can lay everything out. It unpacks itself; film unpacks itself. But I think in the visual arts, actually, we are working on a different plane, actually. I think it’s—I find it disheartening in a sense when art goers come to an art exhibition and they believe—and they expect the artwork to unpack itself, to kind of like, just lay out for them. And in the end the kind of artwork you get is very didactic, you know, it becomes like going to school again, you know, and all art…“we are stupid,” and basically the art is supposed to enlighten you. But I think art works on a different level, actually, and I think it’s just as important, it’s trying to kind of open up the way we see things. In the past, you know, when I was a younger artist, I used to think that my artwork needs to unpack everything and everything needs to be in it, but then I realized that, actually, as an artist if I can get away with one idea—if I can push one idea—I’ve really succeeded. And the work doesn’t need to talk about all those issues that we urgently need to talk about, actually. But the thing is that, as an artist, we have the advantage that we have the body of work that we can build to actually eventually speak about the whole thing. The way we see it is very important, actually. And the way we see things, I feel that needs to be informed from our own experience of being here, you know, because our bodies exist in the space, and it’s under the pressure of whatever thing is happening to us here. It needs to be…it’s informed by being here, actually, I think it’s very important. So, I feel that someone, say like somewhere far away, would never be able to experience or be informed in the same way—I feel that those nuances are actually very important. [2:58] Joanne Leow: Nuances and histories. Charles Lim: And histories, actually, yeah. Joanne Leow: Right, like histories are embedded in the body. When you were doing your work, I mean, yes histories, nuances, and your body, obviously, like your presence on that coastline, or in the water, or— Charles Lim: Yeah. Joanne Leow: —on the foreshore. But then, when we talk about the Foreshores Act, there’s this legal apparatus as well that governs our bodies and the actual material, like the physical world. Can you just talk a bit more about that? I mean the Foreshores Act is so interesting… Charles Lim: Yeah. Joanne Leow: …how do you see that relationship between your art and something like this? This, you know, immense… [3:31] Charles Lim: I think the Foreshores Act is something quite invisible. And I think it’s quite interesting as a sailor to engage as an artist in the invisible, because actually as sailors we are actually trying to deal with something that’s invisible, and the wind is invisible. As a sailor it’s like, you know, there are many ways of looking at, at forming a relationship with the wind. I could go to a weatherman and then he looks at all these weather charts and he shows me like, “oh, there’s a front coming,” and then “it’s going to cause the wind to veer in this way.” But then what happens when you’re sailing in the race course—that’s a very general weather shift, actually—but what happens in the race course, there are these micro-shifts happening, and it’s very important to navigate your boat through these micro-shifts so that you can have an advantage over your opponents, so you can sail faster. So, that’s one way of sailing a safer way, actually. And what’s really interesting is that when you sail, you are in a way forming a relationship with something that’s invisible. But there are ways of looking, of forming that relationship, and it’s looking at things—what the wind is doing to the sea. Say, like, when the wind blows over an area of the water, it forms a patch of wind, so you can actually literally see the wind patch moving in the water. [4:58] Joanne Leow: So the water makes the invisible visible. Charles Lim: Visible, yeah. So what the effect—but actually in the end, you still can’t see the wind. But it does—like the spray, the way that the patch is moving, the shape of the patch—and these things, it’s really interesting because initially when I was sailing, I couldn’t see it, when I was younger. And then what happened was I did painting, and then because you are so in tune with graduations…so, from painting, when I went back into sailing, suddenly I could see all the wind ships, actually. So, what’s happened is that, as a sailor, there are multiple ways of sensing this. You’re looking, and then also you can feel the pressure on the wind. So it’s like your… [5:39] Joanne Leow: Your own body… Charles Lim: …your own senses, so it’s about triangulating information, actually. And then you triangulate the information and it becomes automatic. And then in the end you have this third thing that’s actually created—that’s floating out there, and in a sense, for my installations, that what I’m trying to do. In a way I’m building a conspiracy (laughs), you know, I’m putting a bit here, and then I’m putting a bit there, I’m putting a bit there. And that’s why it’s…when I’m doing the install for SEA STATE, I feel that it’s very important that I have this light, actually, that’s in the space, so the viewer, the person that’s in there, he is aware of his own body, you know. I’m kind of against dark spaces for my own work at this point in time, because I feel that in context of Singapore, actually, that the way we view information is so narrative, is so linear, it’s like, “oh now look at this, now look at this, now look at this, now look at this.” And then, you know, then you build a thing and then you go, “oh, okay, this is what you’re trying to say.” When I have an installation space there are these numerous works inside the space, like numerous videos, actually, and objects. And your body is there, and because you’re aware of your body, you’re actually compelled to move in the space, so when you’re moving around the space, you’re looking at the works at different viewpoints against other works. You don’t just look at one work on its own. So, what I’m trying to do is, actually, from moving the works from a space where it’s very narrative, highly narrative, into more of a play around situation, actually.

: Charles Lim 3; Charles Lim discusses Singapore's Foreshores Act and the process of reclamation. He talks about how the coastline has changed over the course of his life., Joanne Leow: Come back to the question of the Foreshores Act. So we were saying it’s not a narrative in that sense. I mean, yes, the government is so full of official narratives of Singapore “a fishing village, now look at us,” right, but that Act is— Charles Lim: But that is completely invisible. Joanne Leow: Yes. Charles Lim: They don’t want people to know about it. Joanne Leow: Yeah, and they don’t—and so, what do you see? Your art is a form of resistance against that totality, so I guess what do you see the Act—you said it’s invisible—what else do you see it as? [0:29] Charles Lim: Okay, we can look into the history of the Foreshores Act. What’s really interesting about the Foreshores Act is that it was…you know, usually there’s this very polemic kind of argument—so, maybe now you call it the Global South, and Europe, you know, and the West. They did all these horrible things to us and all that, and now you see some—you know, with Trump and all that—some fight back, actually. And, in a sense, I feel that that argument is becoming more and more generalized; it’s quite horrible, actually. I don’t think people are just…you can’t say a whole bunch of people are just horrible, like “all white people are terrible.” And what’s interesting about the Foreshores Act is when you look at it…when the law was introduced, it was in 1880—1875, I think. [1:13] Joanne Leow: 1876. Charles Lim: ’76. Actually, when you do some research on it, I don’t think it was called the Foreshores Act at that point. It was called, like, the Ports and Harbours…maybe check on that. Because right now I’m going through a colonial proclamation, actually. And what’s interesting is that it was actually introduced by the East India Company. Singapore was under the East India Company at the time. And just imagine your country…you know, if your law is based on Google coming to your community and setting up a bunch of laws… Joanne Leow: It’s a corporation. [1:45] Charles Lim: This is our legacy. And what’s really interesting is that when I looked at—in UK, I’m trying to look for the Foreshores Act in UK—they don’t have it. I don’t think they have it. They have the Crown lease, it’s under the king, the queen, the king. But I need to look into that more. So, it’s obviously a colonial thing, and there are several things that are interesting in it. One is called—I think within the sections there’s one part that says that “if you—if a community owns land along the coastline of the state, the state can take away that property from the community, actually, for the defense of the state.” So what happened was that the British actually had this law, but they didn’t really use it to the maximum, but what happened was that when Singapore became independent, and then…in the ‘70s, actually—this is something of a show that I did with Mustafa, actually, and you asked me…this show called “in search of raffles’ light,” because we were looking through Straits Times newspaper articles, and then we found out that it didn’t reflect really—the articles didn’t reflect—what my experience of the sea was. And then later on we found out that actually if you look in the archives of Singapore in the ‘70s, it was actually very vibrant, there are a lot of people having activities in the sea, there was like sea events that were like Golay races, with communities that were not from Singapore, from the Riau islands, from Batam, and hence the problem with Singapore is nation building. And the sea was actually quite porous, in a sense, the relationship was very porous. And what happened was that all these people got moved, through this law, actually, got moved into the center of Singapore. And I think there were MPs, actually, representing islands along the coast, and they actually want my—components of my house, Mata Ikan was actually…but they didn’t really use the Foreshores Act, they just reclaim that, and then from there it became…and then the other law within the Foreshores Act, I think it’s section five, is it, or three…it’s called a proclamation. And I think that is really interesting. What happens is that the president of Singapore actually goes there, and then he does a proclamation. But before that, what happens is that—it’s really interesting—when you do the proclamation, when you do the reclamation, they do reclamation and they drop sand in the sea—maybe I can show you some video. This is kind of like the first part of proclamation. [4:03] Joanne Leow: So then the president goes there to the shore and… Charles Lim: No, not really, so what happens is that they’re dropping sand in the sea, it’s just literally dropping sand— Joanne Leow: Yeah. [4:10] Charles Lim: —in the sea. And then the sand is in the sea, and then there’s water, and then at some point in time the sand actually breaks through the water, and it becomes land, physically it’s land, you know, as a sailor you’re like, I take a boat, I go there, I see land. I can’t go any further. But what’s really interesting is that if you look at the chart in Singapore it says that being reclaimed works in progress. So, that land actually legally is not land yet. And this is actually being confirmed with an engineer that I know from Surbana, actually. And what happens is that that land is not legally land because the land is too unstable. If you build anything on it, things sort of collapse, or move, ropes will actually break apart. And what happens is that on the reclaimed land, there are these machines out there, on the east coast of Singapore, they use this machine called CPT, Core Penetrative Test, or Cone Penetrative Test. And then on the west side it’s by JTC, it’s another company, they use a data process that’s called Soil Investigation Test. And the East Side, what happens is the soil investigation test, is they drop this machine in there and they pull up core samples. Sand, material that they find from the ground, and they bring it to the lab, and then they find, okay, then they research like… [5:27] Joanne Leow: What’s in there… Charles Lim: …what’s—whether the sand is stable or not, or the land is stable or not. On the other side the lab, it’s actually on the land. Both instances when I encountered these people, they are actually from Myanmar, these geologists, they are from Myanmar. Because what happened was that when Singapore became independent, we had—the NUS department had a geology lab. And the…our ministers actually thought that, “Singapore, we’re not into coal mining, we’re not into…why should we have a geology lab?” So, they actually shrunk the geology lab, so we don’t have enough geologists in Singapore. So, what happened was that we started getting a lot of geologists from Myanmar, actually, and from outside Singapore. So, mainly these people are from there. But now, recently, actually, NUS has increased their…they realized this, so they increased their geology lab. So what happens is that they have these machines out there, and these people are measuring the solidity of sand, it’s just something I’m particularly interested in, measuring, measuring, measuring. I think it takes something like, in the past it was like four years, and then now they’ve dropped to something like two years because they have all these new methods of making the sand compress faster, like putting pipes in the water, in the sand, or plastic. And what happens is that that data is collected, and is given to a certain department within HDB—the apartments they are doing, the reclamation—the HDB, military, or JTC. I’m not too sure what this part is, because I tried contacting the people that are doing this; in JTC I think there’s a department called the Land Reclamation Design Unit, and I think there’s only like four or three people inside.

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Intertidal Polyphonies

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