“Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.”
Calvino, I. (1997). Invisible Cities (New Ed.). Vintage Classics.
•The dérive starts on a slow note so I take a seat and have a cup of coffee. As the coffee slowly makes me aware of my surroundings the city becomes alive in front of me. More people out, more cars, more noise. Is it the coffee? Or is there a time of the day in which this neighbourhood springs to being? Did I just witness that?
•Sunday vibe. Sunday is a day that can be felt in very similar ways throughout the world.
•The incense, heat and walking make me a bit melancholic. This area does seem of earlier days.
•The market used to be an air raid shelter. Brutalist & functional in aesthetic.
•In this area residents make an effort to keep shared spaces. It gives me a sense of great communal living.
•I watch a girl put the day’s laundry inside, is this my signal for the rain that is about to come?
•Small spaces (dwellings) call for clever solutions. The tubes that poke out on the façades of buildings are used for putting sticks, on which the laundry is aired.
•At times I feel that this city is a ghost-town before 4 o’clock. People keep indoors until the heat ceases and it is bearable to step outside.
This is the last installment for this project. It was a great experience to submerge myself in the Singaporean cityscape over the last months. What I have sensed will be part of me for time to come.
Thank-you!
Project funded by FONCA (National Fund for Culture & Arts)-CONACYT (National Science and Technology Council). Mexico
The map images used for this work are from © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA. http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.
