01- CITY OF KAMU
presented by DFA2A of Nanyang Academy of Fine Art (Dip,) - Alya, Charlene, Chloe, Farreen, Natalie, Oy Yin, Alice, Chanelle, Hannah, Hidayah, Liyana, Kenenza, Wing Lam.
presented by DFA2A of Nanyang Academy of Fine Art (Dip,) - Alya, Charlene, Chloe, Farreen, Natalie, Oy Yin, Alice, Chanelle, Hannah, Hidayah, Liyana, Kenenza, Wing Lam.
A City of Kamu : Archiving Imaginations, Imagining Archives roots from in-class explorations within the Concept and Context component of the Art Studio 3 Module where the notions of archives and imagining new futures are weaved by the students of class DFA2A. The project sets out to (re)activate personal archival objects while engaging in acts of role playing situations based on ongoing realities like the pandemic and causality of choice.
Kamu, meaning You in Malay, holds the crux of this project wherein; the cities are manifested from the interior spaces of the Self. And how the versions of us exist in multitudes and plenitudes of possibilities through artmaking. The project was inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities published in 1972 where there was a kind of reordering of the emotional and philosophical reverberations through the fabrication of cities. That very same way, the students were tasked weekly to narrate the possibilities of building new worlds out of interjections and interventions; all in the name of imagination.
The landscapes sieved out from the project all hold spaces for the memory, material and meaning. They also render the quality of possession, preservation, presentation and performance. Finally, that eventual manifesto to put forth altered states of the alternative. Alternative that reveals hints of the multifaceted hopes, dreams and re-imagination of the participants.
“Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
The project also attempts to redefine the method of pedagogy in weaving play, the personal and the collective through these acts derivative of circumstances and consequences. That artmaking itself becomes a larger experience of process and constant work-in-possibility.
