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Recirculations Recirculations » Amplifications

As the city enters a lockdown, many communities that already bear the brunt of risk and attrition, with little access to state and societal support, have been made more vulnerable. Differentials of race, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation, and nationality are brought to the fore and must not be ignored.

During this time of social distancing, a house is still not a home for many.

Recirculations redirects attention to the ongoing initiatives people have created for support and survival in this time, through contributions by fellow cultural workers, whether professionally or informally.

The idea is that contributed works are presented on this page alongside cultural workers’ specific “asks” to encourage support for ongoing community efforts.

We’ve already collated a growing list of ongoing efforts and initiatives that you may support on the Amplifications page, here: softwallstuds.space/Amplifications

We encourage visitors viewing the works here to support the efforts listed at the link above or at the “asks” section below, in your own capacity. Upon doing so, one may ‘register’ as a supporter in the next section.

There is no buying, selling, or auctioning of the works/contributions on this page. Instead, show your support:

1. Contribute to ongoing efforts listed at the Amplifications page, or at the “Asks” by cultural workers. Do this in your own capacity, whether via funds, groceries, hygiene products, secondhand IT equipment, time and labour, or any other needs.

2. Keep some form of documentation of your support (for example, a transaction advice or a personal testimony).

3. ‘Register’ as a supporter by filling up this form with your contact details, your mode of support, and your documentation: https://forms.gle/b649yN4BKYa7MNag7

4. We’ll keep you updated via email when your support has been registered: You’ll be provided the instructions to access supporter only works, updated over new asks and contributions and works that have changed across time. Thank you!

Parameters for contributions: We are interested in residues—annotations, reference pictures, archives, leftovers, b-sides, drafts et al. of your creative practice—and/or in entwinement with our respective lives—that perhaps feel especially resonant at this point in time.

A thought keyed into “notes”; the first stroke of a downscaled painting practice; a child’s tantrum; daily rituals; a practice seen in a new way. We wish to draw attention to the poetics and temporality of leftovers, wastes, ephemera, errata;

Material scatters that seem unimportant, unfinished, but which nonetheless fill the substrata and periphery of our lives, while also drawing attention to very real and urgent needs in this point in time.

These are nudges towards reframing, repurposing and rehabilitating, in part not to overburden individuals in respective times of stress, but also to tap into an energy of reflection, recontextualisation and play. We hope this exercise is one way of directly addressing material needs at this point in time, while taking creative coordinates and re-orientations from the submissions that complexify our understandings of this time and the structures that surge forward (or recede), hopefully forming a fretwork that leaven, breathe, break, heal, splice, think and feel anew.

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Alongside your work, your “asks” will be published. You could provide your patreon or paynow details, if you need financial support to tide through this difficult period; list down organizations that you would like for people to support; or an action you wish supporters would perform.

If you have a work you would like to contribute, please fill up this form:
https://forms.gle/iGusQ9CoNsGkNaxi9

We will keep you posted, and thank you!

List of initiatives

Contributor’s asks

View works

Asks

An articulation of needs and/or wants from cultural workers who have contributed works to Recirculations, for specific communities and/or themselves.

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Lai Yu Tong: Hello everyone, I finally got down to making some physical copies of a few Cosmologists albums that I made over the years. Each album is going for $50 (the price is flexible, let me know what you can afford) and the full amount will be redistributed through the wares mutual aid spreadsheet. You may text me at 83667623 or email lai.yu.tong25@gmail.com if you'd like to an album or would like to chat. Take care everyone.

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Salty Ng Xi Jie:The next time you go out for a walk or to get groceries, move slowly, breathe deeply. See that the sky is still the same. Make eye contact with strangers and send them telepathic messages of warmth and conviviality. Alternatively, stand at the toilet paper section of your local grocery store and have gentle (and technically illegal) conversations with fellow shoppers about their preferred brand (you can talk about thickness, softness, ply level, embossed pattern, value for money).

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Jill J. Tan and Teo Xiao Ting:Blow some bubbles, take some pictures of them and/or their traces. Have fun and share the images with us on your social media platforms with the hashtag #bubblebreaker ~

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Berny Tan: The ability to practice social distancing is a form of privilege. While the state has chosen to use the phrase 'safe distancing measures', distancing cannot always be conducted 'safely'. The act itself could threaten lives, and not just livelihoods. If you are able, please consider donating to NGOs assisting marginalised communities for whom distancing isn't always 'safe' – HOME, TWC2, and HealthServe to support migrant workers; AWARE to support victims of domestic violence; and those who have fallen through the cracks and are asking for help via wares' mutual aid spreadsheet.

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Jenny Cheng:I ask that this Covid-19 pandemic helps us realise that we ought to have more compassion, respect and inclusion towards people, especially foreign workers, and it is time people think about how we have not been treating them right. If you are able, please consider volunteering or donating to organisations such as HOME, TCW2, Itsrainingraincoats, and HealthServe.

Jill J. Tan: In the spirit of this ongoing collaboration with my mother, I ask that those of us who are able support artists making work centered around children (https://give.asia/campaign/rolling-on-artist-residency#/).

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Aki Hassan: “Ensure that you are firstly prioritised and that you're taking care of yourself. Reach out to your immediate circle of friends and acquaintances when you are able to. Check-in and offer support within your capacity. I would like to use this opportunity to signal-boost organisations and communities that support our trans & lgbtq+ siblings. Get in touch and lookout for ways to continue (financially) supporting them. Some that I have in mind are: The T Project / Oogachaga / UK QTIBIPOC Emergency relief & Hardship Fund / Small Trans Library Grocery Fund / Queer Care Net. ❤️”

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Ryan Lim Zi Yi:
“If you feel that you are able to provide any form of support to the urgent needs of people who are badly affected by this pandemic crisis, please do check out and help spread these links to the people you know: tinyurl.com/waresmutualaid and https://softwallstuds.space/Amplifications. Let us all start looking out for each other and lend a helping hand for those in need.”

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non:“There has been a wellspring of charity during this time of crisis, and at the kernel of these expressions of care, generosity, and mutual aid is an implicit recognition of mutual entanglement—we're not so much isolated from one another after all. However, charity should not eclipse over the need for critique, especially in a city so bereft and impoverished in political consciousness. In a city that demonizes dissent. That pits activists against each other. Much of this pandemic has revealed that the state is fragile, desperate to hold onto its face-saving narratives and massaged statistics than come to an apology. It smacks of deeply ingrained political rot.

My ask is that alongside supporting much-needed community initiatives, listen and amplify the counter-narratives. I will only recommend organizations here, such as New Naratif (who are in need of funds), TWC2’s reportage on migrant worker issues during this time, The Online Citizen, but there are many journalists and activists out there who have been speaking truth to power. Read, debate, take care of yourselves and one another.”

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Johann Yamin:“Please do check for any urgent needs on mutual aid sheets (such as wares’) listed at the Amplifications page to see if you’re able to provide support; or donate to organisations doing critical work to support the migrant community, such as HOME or TWC2, if you have the capacity.”

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Huiying Ng:“Please: Leave me a note about care: propagation, giving and receiving it, about the packages you send love in. Send this to me at huiying.n[at]gmail.com with the Subject Title “Seeds are Vectors because…” I will work with Foodscape Pages to produce a series of posts for caring, to be disseminated in the coming months as supportive assurance, food for feelings in the time of covid.

Share and follow Foodscape Pages on instagram, as a space which will be publishing material on seed, care, food, and soil in May through June.

Support mutual aid efforts and organizations providing meals at this time here.”

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Works

Contributions from cultural workers. These are the accumulations of residues—annotations, reference pictures, archives, leftovers, b-sides, drafts et al. of creative practices—and/or in entwinement with our respective lives—that perhaps feel especially resonant at this point in time.

Cosmologists
2018–2020
Lai Yu Tong

Christina & Sergej (2018)
https://cosmologists.bandcamp.com/album/christina-sergej

A slightly different album from the rest, made mostly from synthesiser loops and various recorded samples. It's a slow album mostly of drones. An album of elements and breaths.

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Difficulty (2018)
https://cosmologists.bandcamp.com/album/difficulty

Album recorded on an old classical guitar (my first guitar passed down from mum) in the bomb shelter on a warm night some Augusts ago.

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Learning (Grandma's Piano) (2018)
https://cosmologists.bandcamp.com/album/learning-grandmas-piano

An album dear to my heart and one I do not listen to. Recorded on iPhone, containing my first attempts at playing the piano.

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Two Deaths, Paranoia, & the Moving Blues (2020)
https://cosmologists.bandcamp.com/album/two-deaths-paranoia-the-moving-blues

An album recorded on 3-string acoustic guitar with intimate samples of home. Recorded as we were preparing for a move in March.

energetic bodies
2015–2020
Salty Ng Xi Jie

1. It was at that time quite inconceivable to have been allowed to bring outside food into prison. We were filming a cooking show as part of a conceptual art project in a Portland, Oregon correctional facility. In a symbol of compliance, I bring packaging out so the prison guards can tick this trash off their item checklist when I leave. I save whatever I can for my home kitchen. This ended up being my travel toiletries bag. It is a talismanic reminder of the fun me and my collaborators had in a sterile classroom filming the making of cheese-brick burritos and magic cheesecakes - the gleefulness they exhibited in dehumanising conditions.

2. This pass saves me from going through the metal detector and being escorted every time. The US Department of Corrections has suspended all visits and volunteer programs due to covid. It is unclear when they will ever continue. I worry about the health and safety of those imprisoned, especially my collaborators, inside.

3. Used as a discussion prompt for Senior Women’s Erotica Club, my vibrator henceforth carries the encouragement, vulnerability and friendship of the older women in the Club. Now a companion during covid times when apart from lover on the other side of Earth.

4. What is the future of busking in pandemic times? (prop from Singapore Minstrel; the Minstrel can no longer work)

5. How does time feel, how does hair grow during lockdown?

6. Pre-zoom cleansing / post-performance ritual

#bubblebreaker
2020
Jill J. Tan and Teo Xiao Ting

Upon returning to Singapore on April 30th 2020, we [Jill and Xiao Ting] found ourselves quarantined in Swissotel the Stamford on the same day, 26 floors apart. Instagram algorithms facilitated our first contact with each other, and notified us of our shared location.

The rest came into existence, into this exchange, buoyed by literal and affective bubbles. We met for the first time in person, in the hotel lobby, after being released from the Stay Hotel Notice, taking care to be at least 1 metre apart.

@tape_measures
2020
Berny Tan

A crowdsourced visual record of safe distancing markers in Singapore.

interloCUTER, contact tracing
2017–Present
Jenny Cheng (with Jill J. Tan)

Upon Jenny’s request, Jill began collecting her used daily contact lenses for a year while living in Chicago. The resulting sculptural pieces Jenny made with these contact lenses, which hardened in storage and were then rehydrated for shaping and colouring, foreground the grotesqueness of biological mattering and contact, and the intimacy of handling them, as belied by their resultant forms of pastel colour sheets and flowers. The act of collecting from a distance also began a performance of archiving connective organic and inorganic tissue as circulating the mother-child relation that strains and sprouts intimacies over space and time.

making things left unfinished
2019–2020
Aki Hassan

These are selected images documenting my processes of making prior to covid-19. I was working towards an installation for my final degree show in Glasgow School of Art. When this pandemic transformed into a global crisis, there were sudden closures and stricter measures made on borders and movement. I left my life back in Glasgow without having a chance to have a closure. I was not able to say goodbye to my friends as we were discouraged to leave our flats. I had to leave my books and work-in-progress behind, in my studio. Looking back, it makes me wonder when I will have access to art-making tools and resources again.

I Found The Cardboard In The Trash, Then I Painted On Them, And Then I Put Them Back In The Trash (Attempts 2, 4, 5, 15, 21)
2019–2020
Ryan Lim Zi Yi

Someone once asked me, “Are these phrases important or are they just like murmurs?”. She said that it felt like they were eventually going to be read out by someone so they become and feel important. To be honest, I don’t know if they were ever important to begin with. They were never something I wanted to say, maybe just something to remember, something to keep in mind, like an attitude. Perhaps she’s right, they could be like murmurs, just waiting to be heard.

Bakes
2020Experimental Encounters with Chand and Mengju

Livestream on 30th May, 2pm. More details to be announced.

Follow us on:
@chandcmohan
@meng.juice
@experimental.encounters

miss anthropy addresses errrr....
2020
non

A tentacle-washing video by miss anthropy (urs truly) in a eutrophic oceanic soupy world, defeating the purpose of tentacle-washing in the first place. What happens when miss anthropy comes to this realization...?

HyperGarden
2019
Johann Yamin

A hypertext game that may be played here. Password will be released to registered supporters.

Taking the form of a branching interactive fiction, players explore the remnants of a decrepit mycological research facility.

Genes and Vectors
2020
Huiying Ng

This was written at the start of the Circuit Breaker, amidst a bout of frustration about the pausing of public sociality, already so hard-won in Singapore, and amidst anxieties about the virus. It was later made into a sheet for circulation.

Please: Use this seed! Print it, share it. Use it. Organise a remote seed sharing exchange. An online seed swap. Steal the words for your own genetic swap—something to remind ourselves that life is viral in many ways.

Direct this to friends who would be interested. Download the sheet here.

Lingering Lines (in Varying Degrees of Tension): Tracing Waste Circuits in Yogyakarta

A landfill imaginary: heaps upon heaps of desiderata emptied onto a milky chaos: a surround smell. The stink miasma wafts under torrents of rain and heat. The nose is not a device to switch off, neither is it an organ that closes nor retracts, it has no defense mechanism. Your feet sinks into a slurry of miscellany, it becomes an imperceptible fragment with the other scraps of plastic straws, plastic bags, leftover vegetables, chunks of rubber, a styrofoam cup, a bottle cap, packaging of a laundry detergent, a head of a toothbrush, hundred particles of soil, or dirt, clumped between hairs, the plant entangles its roots. The landfill is a frontier, a flat earth without frame, horizonless.

A Provisional List of Actors in the Waste Circuits of Yogyakarta

TPST Piyungan administrative office
Waste workers in TPST Piyungan
Managers or middlemen in TPST Piyungan
Caretakers
‘Weeds’
Insects: flies, dragonflies, beetles, ants
‘Pests’
Toxins and leachate
Villagers around TPST Piyungan (who may or may not work in the landfill)
Cattle
Recycling companies
Gases: methane, carbon dioxide, oxygen and other simple hydrocarbons
Bacteria and viruses
Tourists; the tourism industry
Ministry of Public Works, government of the Special Region of Yogyakarta
Consumers
Tropical weather
Etcetera

The word ‘waste’ comes from vastus, with the same Latin root as the word ‘vast’ and its vacant neighbours, vanus, vaccus and the verb vasto, ‘to make empty or vacant, to leave unattended or uninhabited, to desert’. Early usage of the word ‘waste’ suggests a dual connotation of immensity and emptiness: unpopulated country, the enormous, desolate regions of desert or wilderness. Since waste is imbued with the terminal conditions of valuelessness, finitude and dissolution, the landfill is seen as a crypt where the final fate of things rest, a space outside of the temporal punctuations of human-time and teleology. Thus, the landfill feels unthinkable, not because it is insensible but rather, over-sensible, saturating our response-ability with its intense, reticulating sensorium that exceeds human proportion. But to read the landfill as a void, chaos, total disorganisation, is to deny any response. The reading of the landfill-as-chaos is ironically reductive, a lip service to complexity.

On soft/WALL/studs’ research period in Yogyakarta with Cemeti, various constellations of the group visited TPST Piyungan (Tempat Pembuangan Sampah Terpadu, or integrated waste treatment plant) to study the region’s waste cultures, communities and infrastructure. Less than a timeless landscape, TPST Piyungan was bustling with activity. Clusters of waste workers, a sickle in their hand, gleaned the banks of the landfill for aluminium tins, glass bottles and plastics of all variety. Makeshift huts of canvas, umbrellas and spare wood served as sorting stations. Herds of goats and cows devotionally grazed the surface of the landfill, with plants flourished along its streams, salvaging the leftovers of nutrient modernity.

At the risk of romanticising the landfill as an agricultural idyll, these workers work in potentially toxic conditions under an informal wage labour system. At least half of the waste workers of the estimated 450 total are also domestic migrants, coming from towns outside of Yogyakarta, such as Monosari. They are tolerated by the landfill’s administration, rather than governed or provided for. For many, the work is an opportunity that spreads by word-of-mouth within social networks of friends and family. It was mentioned that despite state investments into medical waste disposal technologies in hospitals, some medical waste end up at TPST Piyungan due to infrastructural gaps. One waste worker we met works into the night with a headlamp. Even though the landfill is officially designated as a controlled landfill to maximise space and reduce environmental degradation, an administrator we interviewed jokingly remarked that he wasn’t certain if the landfill practiced open dumping now.

A Story of Landfill Gases, Rain and Bacteria

In the early morning of 21st February 2005, villagers living near the massive Leuwigajah dumpsite in Bandung, Indonesia awoke to the sound of three muffled blasts. In an avalanche of melting plastic, fire and refuse, 143 people and 71 houses were buried under trash heap that extended 1000 metres and rose up to 9 metres. The residents were mostly waste workers who picked daily at the dumpsite. The avalanche has been caused by an unexpected collaboration of aerobic bacteria, gas buildup within the waste mass and heavy rainfall. National Garbage Care Day held on 21st February was initiated in remembrance of this incident.

Speaking to the administrator, it became clearer that TPST Piyungan was far from its frontier imaginary. Yet, this imaginary returns to haunt in the construction of landfills. Started in 1995, TPST Piyungan receives waste from most of the Special Region of Yogyakarta, including Bantul, Sleman and Yogyakarta city, and was slated to reach maximum capacity in 2012. A landfill can only be built 2 km away from residents, away from water sources, power and telecommunication lines. To prevent the runoff of leachate into the region’s groundwater, the landfill must be built at lower elevations, like the southern Bantul city. Such design considerations made Piyungan a near-suitable site, save several inconvenient footnotes: there were villagers in the radius of the proposed site; three of five houses in the area were acquired by the state (with the details of the two other ‘acquisitions’ left unexplicated); as well as existing ecologies within the site itself. Locals joke that Bantul is the cleanest city in the entire region, even though the city collects its waste. The frontier imaginary is embedded in waste infrastructure that must render its mechanisms opaque: out of sight, out of mind. Pak Sorono, the caretaker of Cemeti, informed me that rubbish from Cemeti used to be disposed at a dump in the vicinity of Alun Alun Kidul, the city’s square, which is a popular tourist area. In recent years, the dump has been closed, which means that Pak must travel 10 minutes by motorcycle to Pasar Ngasem to take out the trash. The tourist city strains itself, with more and more tears on its urban fabric as it frantically hides the seams.

A Story of Villagers around TPST Piyungan

A stream of garbage trucks adds 500 tonnes of waste into TPST Piyungan daily. In 2015, villagers around the landfill barricaded its entrance for a few days, seeking higher compensation from the state. The act of protest caused an administrative shift of landfill from the municipal authority to the regional government. The administration not only manages technical issues within the landfill, but more so recently, they mediate social conflicts. On the car ride to the landfill, we saw a banner that wrote: “Bantul: where dreams come to die.”

At Pasar Ngasem, garbage collectors sorted assiduously on top of a truck, compressing unruly clumps of stuff into a packed heap. Pak pointed out a collector’s motorcycle installed with baskets and frames, which were filled with potentially valuable items, such as spare parts, recyclables and other paraphernalia, from the waste they filter through. Not everything in the bin goes to rest at the landfill. Some end up at Pasar Senthir, a secondhand market that sells an array of tchotchkes, wholes and their parts, priced on a whim and lowered on your bargaining tactics. No item is too broken or dirty to be loved here. Others end up at ‘waste banks’, municipal recycling stations where residents could deposit their recyclables for some money. Even at TPST Piyungan, plastics of every assortment are sold to recycling companies to make other plastic bags or asphalt for road works. But where exactly are these recycling companies, the waste worker we interviewed did not know.

Like the dumps, waste banks and secondhand markets scattered across the city, Piyungan is one node of filtration that allows waste to saunter in and out of the circuit of overlapping value regimes. Asking the same question (“where does this go afterwards?”) to garbage collectors, caretakers and sanitation workers encountered during my trip, I received staccato strokes of waste-lines that formed an ersatz map of the city’s refuse underbelly.

“I leave the trash bags on the front yard every morning, where they are cleared every Friday. And afterwards—“ To begin to think through waste is to take narrative risks, to take imaginative leaps beyond the capitalist plot of manufacture-use-disposal, and to sense them as things that shimmer across regimes of value, desire and utility. To render a moving thing: where does it go, where does it go. It is an ethics of sensing that thaws the imaginary of a frozen landfill, thinking in entangled lines, storylines, that tendril and spread, tighten and slacken with one another. Could we begin to diagram waste circuits as a bundle of lines, rather than a network of terminal points with assumed connections. Pulling at one thread reveals the knots and loops of many others. Rather than a black hole of modernity that the lifeline of all things lead to, take the landfill as a single line among other lines in media res, middling around. And let its perfume linger awhile.

Marcus

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