Creating refuge, subverting productivity

on How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell and Renaissance Singapore? by Kenneth Paul Tan
conversations with Woon Tien Wei and Jennifer Teo of Post-Museum

On a warm afternoon in March 2019, I was nervously shifting in a food court in a mall in Little India. Sitting beside a panel of glass five stories above the ground, I looked down to eye the busy street, the sun hot and orange on my cheek. On the table, my laptop waited for my attention, its bright screen slowly retreating to blackness. A lady approached my table then, breaking my distraction and sending my nerves to my throat. I recognised her gentle eyes, her long hair in a low ponytail. A bespectacled man followed suit, pulling the seat beside me. I smiled and offered a chirpy hello. “Sorry to keep you waiting-“ Oh no, I haven’t been here long, I said. Please, sit. Thank you so much for meeting me.

I was a few weeks into writing my undergraduate thesis. I was studying the nomadic operations of Post-Museum, a Singapore-based artist collective who had closed their primary space near Little India in 2011, just a few short years after its inception. Like many other independent art spaces in Singapore, Post-Museum abstained from state funding to maintain autonomy, then defaulted at the hand of real estate and maintenance costs. The founding duo, Jennifer Teo (Jen) and Woon Tien Wei (Tien) then brought their practice, perhaps best described as a cross between relational aesthetic and civil society work, across neighbourhood blocks, public parks, alternative art spaces and other urban landscapes—a bold feat in a city notorious for its control over public spaces and assemblies.

What intrigued me about Jen and Tien’s practice was that they are not at all on a mission to inveigh against the government or the city they inhabit. There was, I suppose, an existing image in my head of a subversive—of protest: chanting with a megaphone on a podium, their demands repeated by the masses before them; a leader of the pool of ingenious cardboard signs held up in the air. I must admit, I reserve a hint of fondness for this image. It punctuated Indonesian textbooks and newsstands as scenes that secured us our independence, then, decades later, freedom from a brutal dictator. This image survives in our popular consciousness not only as a model of a revolution but as a portrait of patriotism and the dawn of democracy (at the same time, I am very much aware of how this image could quickly morph into misdirected violence. Such mutation had taken countless lives of ethnic minorities, who to this day continue to be denied reparations). But I realised that this is the same image that had led me to equate, to some extent, dissent with clamour. The interiority of Jen and Tien’s practice puzzled me. It seemed to me faint and almost sedated, but as I looked at this city, fortified by strong political control and fuelled by inexhaustible productivity—I understood its power.

Finding Refuge

When I was conducting my research, I was of the opinion that the nature of their practice is necessary for their continuity. Despite moving across urban spaces, Jen and Tien had never been questioned or arrested by the authorities—unlike many of Singapore’s civil society actors. During my conversation with Dr. Kenneth Paul Tan, Associate Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and author of Renaissance Singapore: Economy, Culture and Politics, he described their practice as “gentle”, and contrasted it with the Occupy movement—which embodies the popular image of protest and resistance. I was sure that the benevolent nature of their practice underpins their survival, that is until Tien remarked in our interview that “…creative people tend to paint the city as very harsh, very difficult to practice…It’s not as scary as one claims to be.” I did not understand it then, but Tien expressed not an endorsement of the city’s ways, but an appreciation of it beyond any laws, regulations, or supermajorities. Their resistance lies in their refusal to retreat from the city whose definition and principles of value differ from their own. Jenny Oddell calls this refusal “standing apart”:

“To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving…It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day.”

Jen and Tien’s campaigns are designed for people to encounter and participate in the city through nature, forgotten heritage sites and, above all, each other. “It’s not about us,” Jen said, to which Tien added: “most of these things is about getting people together, and learning to do things together. It’s a collective exploration…most of it is geared to the idea of participation. There's a lot possibility in the city.”

One of their works, Intro to Bukit Brown (2012 – 2014), brought attention to Singapore’s first Chinese municipal cemetery through a series of guided afternoon walks. This project was part of a larger campaign that challenged the city’s plan to exhume some 5,000 graves at Bukit Brown in order to build housing blocks and a new highway. “Enjoy the lovely greenery and serene environment, see some of Singapore’s wildlife, visit some of our forefathers and learn more about the special heritage aspects of Bukit Brown,” Post-Museum’s project page reads. Walking is an innocent act, but the terrain upon which it occurs is a landscape of collective identity. “A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her book Wanderlust. “Just as language limits what can be said,” she continued, “architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.” In other words, the built environment and new development may turn walking into a revolutionary act.

Intro to Bukit Brown saw the fruit of this possibility. Though they could not deter exhumation and demolishment of the site, the campaign for Bukit Brown pushed the city to begin implementing Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) in their redevelopment plans. “This actually is mandatory in many countries, but not in Singapore . . . during Bukit Brown, this was one of the things we were talking about that should be done,” Jen said. The city subsequently conducted EIA for the Central Catchment Nature Reserve, Singapore’s largest nature reserve which contains the country’s main reservoirs: MacRitchie, Upper Seletar, and Peirce reservoirs. The reserve will be impacted by the construction of the upcoming Cross Island Line (an MRT track), which is set to finish in 2029. The work of Post-Museum, along with other heritage groups and volunteers, contributed to what Oddell calls “context collection” (as opposed to “context collapse”, the proliferation of selves and obfuscation of message and intent on social media):

“…any attempt at context collection will have to deal not only with context collapse online, but with preserving public and open space, as well as the meeting places important to threatened cultures and communities.”

The case of Bukit Brown is certainly a casualty of the Anthropocene, but Oddell offers another term she finds more useful: Chthulucene, coined by Donna J. Haraway, who describes it as an era in which “the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge.” Haraway argues that as “mortal critters” in the Chthulucene, we must band together to “reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and re-composition, which must include mourning irreversible losses.”

After the exhumation of the site began in 2013, Post-Museum gradually ceased their guided walks. They then began to collect, archive and catalogue names on exhumed graves, photographed people (who they call “Brownies”), and spectral sightings at the site in a travelling work titled Bukit Brown Index. The walker invents other ways to go—and Bukit Brown lives on.

Upending Productivity

In 2000, the city released the Renaissance City Report, a landmark publication that presented two strategic thrusts for the development of the arts and culture in Singapore. First, it stated an outward-looking aspiration to become a “global arts city” and a “cultural centre in the globalised world”. Jen and Tien’s practice stands today in direct opposition to the vision of Renaissance Singapore, which, as Terence Lee wrote in his 2004 journal article Creative Shifts and Directions: Cultural Policy in Singapore, pins cultural vibrancy not on the intellectual and socio-political development of the individual but on the industrialisation of creativity that would allow the individual to become economically productive. Their practice aligns with what Oddell describes as “resistance-in-place”:

"…to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity…It means recognising and celebrating a form of the self that changes overtime, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual."

Another of Post-Museum’s project, the Singapore Really Really Free Market (SRRFM), runs counter to this capitalistic order. In the years which they held a space in Little India, Post-Museum organised the market bi-monthly within their premises. Geographer Heather Chi, who observed the market in 2009, argued that SRRFM was an agency of placemaking for Post-Museum: Inspired by the ‘gift economy’, it allowed disparate groups and the marginalised locale of Little India to gather for gratuitous goods and services that emancipated them from their shared fatigue of a capitalistic society. But even as Jen and Tien brought the market across Singapore, it did not lose its capacity to undermine the clutches of capitalism and productivity. To illustrate this is the SRRFM 60: situated at Amoy Street carpark, it faced rows of conserved shophouses that have been repurposed into hipster cafes and restaurant, each worth over $18 million. Although this hardly empowers the Market to transmute the experiences of this development, it allows SRRFM to engender a sense of shared struggle; creating what curator Nicolas Bourriaud calls a “microtopia”. Practicing across urban spaces, Tien said, allows them to offer vital nodules where people can “claim their right to the city.”

Perhaps more critically, SRRFM is a platform where ordinary citizens can exercise care and collaboration. In his book After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, Jedediah Purdy reminds us of a key feminist principle on care work:

“…in modern ecology, there is potential to realise that work is not only industry, the productive action that transforms the world, but also reproduction, the work of remaking life with each year and generation…much socially necessary work is ignored or devalued as “caregiving,” a gendered afterthought to the real dynamos of the economy, when in reality no shared life could do without it.”

SRRFM is, in this way, an escape from the hierarchical and patriarchal social orders, and an ephemeral antidote to the city’s obsession with the productivity of industry.

I found many of Jen and Tien’s principles echoed in Oddell’s manifesto. Their nomadic practice brings to life what Oddell calls “other world”: not a rejection of the world we live in, but rather “a perfect image of this world when justice has been realised with and for everyone and everything that is already here.” It is a kind of resistance that require active participation, Oddell says, but in the “wrong way”, in a way that subverts the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it. “We're interested in how the people can claim back their power,” Jen said. “That is the big cause.”

I pressed a button on my laptop to stop the recording. “Is it clear? It’s a bit noisy,” Jen said. I’m sure it will be fine, I said, and we slowly rolled into casual conversation. Jen pointed to a spot far outside the window, showing me where their space used to be. It’s a pity, I said. I’m sure there was much to be done. Tien hummed, and said, assuredly: “Places happen when the place is made.” That night, as I sat on my bed, sheets of required reading sprawling around me, I highlighted a passage from curator and author Nato Thompson which distilled the rush of hopefulness Jen and Tien left me with. He wrote: “People—and dreams—are a powerful resource who, historically speaking, have created their own worlds in spite of the powers that oppress them.”