re·claim (verb): to claim the return or restoration of, as a right, possession.

“Not breaking any law! We are skateboarding, not rollerblading.”

Old Wang is one of the “residents” on the railway gardens at Clementi. He visits his own plot every morning and evening to tend to his plants. Back at home, he has a wife who does not join him in such activities. “Don’t go near to that plot,” he warned this photographer while pointing to another personal garden adjacent to his. “That owner is fierce and will chase you away with a shovel.” Old Wang used to be a teacher but retired a few years ago. He has been coming to this garden for the last three years. His wife is still working, and like her husband, is a teacher. Old as he may look, he carries buckets of water around almost effortlessly. Even as the photographer complains about the incessant mosquito bites, he candidly proclaims that mosquitoes not longer bite him. “They have got used to my flesh,” he said in Mandarin, the subject he used to teach.

“Come back anytime, friend,” Old Wang says to the photographer before he leaves. The photographer walks back to his car parked in a private housing estate 800m away, while Old Wang will take his regular feeder bus home.

This series of pictures is related to a previous post.

“Meaning is no where bound to the orbit of purpose, intention, or utility“

- Charles Bernstein

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As I raise the idea of “reclaim land” to people, they immediately think of physical land reclamation.

“Like Tuas, izzit?”

“No lah, not that kind…”

So well, part of the excitement now is that I’m able to give them a re-imagining of this term. And if not “that kind”, then what kind? Here’s an inkling of ideas regarding the characters in our project who reclaim land:

1. They are deviants, not defiants.

A group of skaters we interviewed who illegally use a plot of land for their activities once claimed, “We’re not doing anything wrong!” The act of skating itself isn’t wrong, but that they’re at the wrong place criminalises them. That is to say, they’re not out to intentionally challenge or resist the laws in place, as in a defiant, rather, that their act of skating at the wrong place marks them as departing from socially accepted norms (noisy! Dangerous! Damaging public property!) makes them a deviant. These people never had the motive of breaking the law though their interests lie, unfortunately, in a grey area that is not always welcomed by the public. So therein they present not a crime, but a crisis — do we need to open up? More flexibility? More free spaces? What do our current generation crave for?

2. They do not speak the language of our city

The language of our city is clearly written in our street signs — one that mainly converses of safety (as in “No Rollerblading” signs at most HDB void decks) and security (as in “State Land” or “No Trespassing” or “No Littering”). The “No Rollerblading” sign does apply to the aforementioned skaters, but they try to compromise by coming up with a new language. They’ve put up their own signs to supersede the ones in place — “No Skating After 6 P.M.” is one of them, a true act of balancing out so that they can maintain their possession of the land. Is there space for more varied languages, instead of a homogenous one that will eventually be detrimental to diversity?

3. They can’t afford ‘Disneyland with the Death Penalty’

Once in a media class we were given out an article by William Gibson: Disneyland with the Death Penalty. It describes Singapore as an expensive utopia, including having to pay with our freedom. This prosperous city is the vision of one man, and although successful, not everyone buys it, or buys into it. Often the people we interview, such as skaters, street hawkers and kampung dwellers, cite “it’s free!” as one main reason why they occupy a certain space. But also, they aren’t attracted by the glitter of Disneyland that is the Singaporean dream. A micro example is that they don’t always use the shiny facilities availed to them, and ultimately create their own spaces that is at once a more truthful and utopic place for them, at the risk of penalty.

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This group of characters do not reclaim land by adding physical quantity to space, as in breadth, but they add textures and layers to a space, as in depth, with their own laws, languages and activities. It’s a resistance to our constructed city where when one thinks of land reclamation, a big yellow crane of a machinery comes to mind. At the end of the day the construction and reclamation of a land is also up to our own imagination, with our own bare hands, for machines without a mind can never help us re-imagine a space in depth and dimensions and most significantly in new meanings.

It has just occurred to me that GOOD magazine, that I subscribe to, features the “reclaiming” of the urban city too. The last time they were talking about Urban Golf, this time around they featured the Urban Repair Squad. They are a group of cyclists in Toronto who decided to create their own bike lanes when the city decided not to.

They basically go around with stencils and paint and carve out bike lanes and unsuspecting drivers actually follow them. I suppose if anyone does it in Singapore, you’ll be caught for vandalizing instead!

Another group of people reclaimed the basement of a shopping mall as an apartment, check out their adventure!

Finally, some guerrilla gardeners…

One thing I realise about the “reclaimers” featured in GOOD is that they are people of our age and have a more progressive mindset. This is in contrast to the people we have talked to thus far, they don’t see their actions as some greater good that would culminate into a movment, but really just something they want to do

Near the railway gardens mentioned here, on what looks like
uninhabited wasteland at first sight, are signs of human existence.

I wish I could post more but the scanner broke down.

I think Singapore has one of the most organised burial system in the world to manage the potential of overcrowding dead. The cemeteries are divided according to race and religion. Burial plot size is standardised. Within each cemetery are zones tagged with alphanumeric labels for quick identification. But there are still several pockets of land in the country where burials are not permitted or encouraged on which mini cemetery enclaves can be found. In some rare cases, people have made home on the tombs themselves.

I sent this for professional scanning. Turns out a lot better than the school scanner in terms of colours, tones and sharpness. But the most important difference is the alignment. In school, the scanning alignment is terribly off, which results in sections of a picture being chopped away, as well as crooked (in hokkien: seng eh) pictures. 

I do not know yet if scanning every potentially usable picture will be worth it in the long run. Options are: 
1) Send for professional scanning and worry only about the shooting. It costs $8 for each picture scanned.
2) Use school’s scanner and hopefully get the hang of it in the long run at the costs of injuring the transparency slide and man-hours.
3) Buy an Epson scanner for maybe $900.
4) Screw film.

I think I will make a trip to mac lab again for at least a few more hours of trying. In the meantime, I will check out if the misalignment thing happens to all scanners anyway, or is it because the school’s scanner is more prone to it due to age and non-usage. Who wants to make a trip with me to view scanners at Sim Lim or Funan? I think I might really use the scanner for my own purposes in the future.

Looking at the picture, one might think that I am wasting my money shooting on medium format slides when the same picture could be produced using a digital camera. From my perspective, I see a difference between the images shot on MF slides and the images shot with a DSLR. I wonder if other photographers and non-photographers feel any difference. I know in a personal project, it would matter less what others think in terms of the medium used. But this project is a group effort, and increased costs and efforts may compromise on other elements of the project, and may not be fair to other members. 

People, including my own group members, always ask me (not in a confrontational way, of course) why I shoot on MF slides for this project. This is a question that I am constantly struggling with. As time progresses, I find myself with different answers to this question, so much so that I sometimes wonder if they are really reasons or just excuses. I would get frustrated when faced with the question. I think the frustrations stem partly from not being able to justify clearly my decision, as well as the futility of the question. Does it matter to have a tangible rationale? Why can’t I work with a medium simply because I feel motivated to work with it?

As honest as I can be,
1) It makes me more disciplined by making every frame count ($1 per exposure).
2) The higher dynamic range makes shooting environmental portraits or landscapes (very common in this project) with wide exposure ranges manageable.
3) In some cases, people give me more leeway with a camera that does not look and sound like a DSLR.
4) A chance for me to peg “learning something new” to a project which has an end product to show for and involve consequences (satisfaction, grades etc). 
5) I feel motivated to work with it. 

As it is, I am acquiring an affinity for slides.