FUSE#5

FUSE #5
cake that she learnt to make when switching to a keto diet. Another
brought nougats with sesame seeds that she relied on as comfort food
from an Indian mama shop.
Ining, whose family runs a metal workshop in Sembawang,
recounted how Circuit Breaker forced the migrant workers from
Bangladesh and China to bond as they were not permitted to leave
their dormitories and had to share cooking and grocery duties, and
also acclimatise to each others’ dietary preferences. It started a general
conversation about her metal workshop and fabrication which
eventually led to us deciding to visit her studio as part of the final
session in November.
Over the subsequent months, the interest of the group shifted
to research methodologies as we discussed strategies of approach
practice-based research. I was working on an oral history project of
cruising areas in Singapore and shared some difficulties I faced while
conducting these interviews. The second half of the session evolved
into looking at works that negotiate with documenting history, veracity
of accounts, and the ethical positioning of the artist in relation to their
subject. We visited NTU CCA’s penultimate exhibition and discussed
Naeem Mohaiemen Two Meetings and a Funeral video work where
he attempted to reconstruct a history of the Non-Aligned Movement
(NAM) via interviews.
We encountered a mix of theory, audio materials and other
mixed-media as collective points of reference to anchor the conversation
throughout the three months to talk about the promiscuity
of the archive, exposure, and opacity. We read essays penned by
Vijay Prasah regarding the Global Left and the Third World. We
examined S. Rajaratnam’s appearance in the 1973 NAM meeting as
a representative Singapore and the role he performed in shaping
an imaginary Singapore as a global city. We listened to the New
York Times podcast titled Caliphate about the American invasion
of Mosul and reclaiming it from ISIS featuring journalist Rukmini
Callimachi and the peripheral reports that accused her of relying
on unverified sources and challenging the ethical limitations of her
profession. We also took the opportunity to share works-in-progress
to provide necessary critique for each other’s practice, we shared
ways we manage information through online note-taking and time
management apps like Notion.
By way of concluding this short report, I return to a fragment
from a speech in 1979 by S. Rajaratnam that we discovered in the
archives. He titled this speech Old Maps in a New Age and it was made
at the University of Malaya in 1979 on the subject of speaking truth
to power.
23