In this exploratory paper, I ask what kinds of transmedial art and writing are necessary and urgent to archive, critique, and respond to the intertidal zone. By focusing on the mutable coastlines of Singapore and its archipelagic contexts of Malaysia and Indonesia, I consider the rich potential of these spaces as contact zones that have much to teach us about the relations between human and nonhuman forms in this time of climate catastrophe. The intertidal zones are the spaces between the high tide and the low tide, spaces where plants and animals must survive both above the surf and under the surf — places most likely to be altered by waterfront infrastructure and haunted by histories of displacement and dispossession. A focus on these spaces thus gives us a heightened awareness of the inequities and histories of colonial and capitalist violence done to communities of humans and nonhumans. From beaches to ports, harbours to wetlands, and dykes to swamps, intertidal zones are defined by flux, ecological complexity, human and nonhuman desire, infrastructure, visible and invisible environmental devastation, teeming life, and spectral traces. Singapore’s larger archipelagic context shares the common histories of imperialism, development, land reclamation, and dispossession.
By focusing on art, writing, and performance in around these zones by Robert Zhao Renhui, Juria Toramae, Charles Lim, Jeremy Tiang, Clara Chow, and ila, I seek to develop new ways of theorizing transmedial art and literary non-fiction as critical/creative lenses and methodologies to reckon with loss, displacement, “progress,” and extraction in the intertidal zone. How are notions of urban ecology and nature in flux due to these developments? How do site-specific poetry, fiction, art, and other forms of cultural expression offer us alternate, multidisciplinary ways of inhabiting and contesting these spaces? What forms of nonhuman life persist here despite human expansion? Fundamentally, my work will probe what rights and responsibilities we have to these ever-shifting, everchanging spaces. It will seek, through artistic and critical means, to pose questions about what has been lost and what might be to come in our living together in these haunted, resonant, polyphonic spaces.
Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)
Panel 1: Rethinking ‘Trans-’ and ‘Post-’
9:30-11:30am HK/SG / 2:30-4:30am BST / 3:30-5:30am CEST / 9:30-11:30pm EDT / 6:30-8:30pm PDT