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change in 7 days
Adhya Ranadireksa
Deden Hendan Durahman
Henrycus Napitsunargo
Sari Asih
SB2013: if the world changed… – National Library
of Singapore
“you
have to be knowingly unsure,
to
seek certitude within the uncertain
and
not pursue the uncertain with false certitude.”
Ho
Rui An, Several Islands
Give us a photograph, or two, or four,
seven is good too – and we depict tales of a city, a city with her bricks and
whispers, her raindrops and candies, her meandering river and sailors, her
brush strokes, her cacophonous soundtrack, her unsung love affairs, her coffee
and cigarettes at the crack of dawn, her green papayas and its odor, her hopes
and ghosts, gentle and wicked…
A city we remember. Cities are not merely
backdrops to the stories we tell each other over and over again, cities are the
fiber that give these stories the much needed bones – and a pulsation, too. A
jazzy pulse, or one of gamelan, or heavy metal, or tango, or hybrids – so many
cities, so many rhythms.
To remember is not the same as to commemorate – archives of
the city are amnesiac zombie entities of our memory. Graveyards are the sites
where memories as we knew them come to an end. Numbered, catalogued, put in
neat folders and cabinets in underground basements, our memories are stored to
collect dust and fungus. A memory with a pulse is a mobile memory, told or
shown to others – countless times given manifold shapes and forms.
With your help, we want to wake up the
archives of the city, the city of Singapore. The archive, then, will be turned
into a library of visual memory of an ever-changing city, rapid but meandering
changes. We want to collect and show the good, the bad & the ugly, the
delicious and wreckage, the uncanny and repressed, happiness and joy of you,
you and you too, and us as well.
Archival materials are re-animated,
opened-up partially, given a second life in our library change in 7 days at the
National Library of Singapore during SB2013 (and perhaps long after there or
elsewhere when we are no longer present). Visual materials are retrieved from
the city’s multiple archives to give you a chance to connect and re-connect,
browse through, borrow memories, point out to one and another stories thought
long lost and recount them anew.
We also invite you to submit images of
you and your city. Wedding photos, graduation party photos, photos of you with
your family or friends and etcetera… And we hope that your personal photos will
be the many jigsaw pieces of a gigantic puzzle that shows a biography of your
city of Singapore, a city, like any other city, with its great many stories and
ambiguities. The gamut of these memoirs cannot be overseen in a single breath.
Moreover, we – Adhya Ranadireksa, Deden
Hendan Durahman, Henrycus Napitsunargo and Sari Asih, all of us are from
Bandung, Indonesia – respond in individual, artistic ways to a selection we
each make of the visual materials salvaged from the archives and the images you
kindly submitted. In so doing, we weave our threads into this city, your city
as our temporary base, a brief home from which we return with memories, our
memento mori on our homecoming to Bandung, a city with a different beat.
Cities, certainly, are only built
metaphorically in 7 days. However, 7 days is ample time to spectacularly
wipe out an entire metropolis with its sinners, specters and samurais of the
face of the earth. 7 days is also
plentiful of time to alter our imagined city. Images can move us – move us to
built a city, multiple cities out of our memory to remember, to be committed
to, jointly…
(I was asked by the four artists to ghostwrite the above text for their project at SB2013.)
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