Jill J. Tan

Notes on the bicentennial of a f/l/ound/er/ing (2019)

This multimedia work of hybrid poetry, which has video, sculpture, and performance elements, grew out of my poem-essay of the same title on British imperialism in Singapore. Through this work, I explore how my subjectivity as a Singaporean has resulted in an entrenched misrecognition of colonial violence as a birthmark rather than a scab. 

As a Singaporean who has been taught not to notice how the enduring violence of imperial corporate power structures my way in the world, I began making this work to reflect upon 2019 as the bicentennial of the British colonization of Singapore in 1819. The work takes several forms: its origin as poetic text; voiced as part of a soundscape; and as a visually and materially mediated archival object wherein paper pulp is molded– into sculpture, on film, and in performance. 

In my work, I explore how, as a method and expression of inquiry, the poetic holds within itself a built-in resistance to foreclosure. I find that the poetic is a bespoke contraption for mapping out gestures which also embody the qualities of research design that I seek in my ethnographic practice as an anthropologist: the poetic moves and is moved by the ethnographic object in motion. Following its charge can be a way of writing and doing ethnography that instantiates and creates, yet cedes to flow and force. In making this work, the poetic lent the dual modalities of accretion and attrition, and a visual rather than textual literacy, using not only redactions and elisions but cleavage and sequence to build my case of a lost consciousness.  

As I moved through building by way of unlearning, I thought of this hybrid poem not only as a simulacrum of archival form and formulation, but as an entry in itself. I not only suggest the text’s status as archival object through formal mimesis of a historical document, but forge an archival encounter within it by excerpting and then deconstructing my own past writing from 2009 on Singapore’s national historical narratives. Poetics can serve as a pushback against the predisposition towards ossification of the (post)colonial archive that narratives almost always feed into, without deserting the literary entirely. Without as much stock placed in arc and teleology, the poetic as a contraption for a contingent, moving object destabilizes the archive upon entry.

[multimedia performance | duration: 15 minutes] 

Performances:

P7:1SMA (July 26th, 2019)