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Roadway 4
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A fenced off area with a "WORK IN PROGRESS" sign. Tree trunk with foliage.
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Roadway 5
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A pink sign stating "There your heart goes again ponging from point A to point B like some silly little pinball" in a way that makes your eyes move back and forth like the pinball being described. Sign is mounted on a grassy hill.
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Robert Zhao 1
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Robert Zhao recollects how he used to walk for hours on reclaimed land, when the new sand was unstable marsh land before it settled enough to develop., Robert Zhao: My name is Robert Zhao and I’m a visual artist based in Singapore, and I work with photography. My friend—who is a conservationist now—from my secondary school, he would go to Tanah Merah, which is a reclaimed land near—which is now Changi Naval Base. He would bring me to go there and we would walk from Tanah Merah Ferry until the end of the reclaimed land, and that was easily two hours, and it was very amazing for me because I’d never stepped—I mean, I stepped foot into reclaimed land before in Tuas where my father goes to fish—that was kind of my first experience. But to actively walk in so much sand, I immediately felt…and my friend was there because the sand created a lot of habitats. There are marshes, and attracted a lot of different birds to come to Singapore, and he even saw Himalayan vultures there. So, I was very interested in this site because it was very surreal. Subsequently in my diploma in visual comm., all my projects were of the landscape there simply because of the aesthetics. And then when I went to study my BA in Camberwell, BA in photography, that was when I started to think about the possibilities of reimagining the past or things that has not been photographed or has not been used with photographs, especially with the reclaimed land. I started to wonder, how come there just weren’t any images or memories of people in the landscape? Do we really have nothing besides ecological damage that the land has done? Does it have any connection with the people? Did people like me walk in the landscape feeling very surreal in the past? I’m sure there was, but was this documented in any way? So, when I found out that—perhaps because it was artificial dunes that nobody really cared so much for it, but when it’s natural dunes, like in Japan or Vietnam or in the States, or in France, it attracts a lot of attention. People visit the dune, they walk in the dune, and walk out, walk in and walk out. So, for me, I was doing the same thing in the same kind of landscape, but in Singapore, in a very highly artificial landscape. So, that’s when I appropriated all these images from the dunes I visit overseas into a dune here, and say that it was a dune here, and these are images from the ‘70s or ‘80s. A kind of imagery I felt was lacking in our discourse about the reclamation. And other ways to approach it besides a process, you know, because they’re huge, they’re huge land mass and it’s not a typical Singapore land mass. But it’s a huge land mass for me that has been constantly happening since the ‘60s.
[2:46]
Joanne Leow: And beyond that, actually, before that.
Robert Zhao: And be—yeah, even when Raffles was here they started reclaiming. And I think it’s constant enough to be a feature. I think it’s only in the last ten years that restriction to that kind of land was stepped up, because seventeen years ago I could freely walk in and out. And it was towards, nearing ten years ago, then maybe we can sometimes get in, and then finally, now, they fence it off, I mean you can’t really go. I don’t know why, but I think maybe with social media and images being easier to…
Joanne Leow: Transmit.
[3:26]
Robert Zhao: Yeah, transmit. It was just a good idea to not let people go in. Although, already there were very little people inside anyway.
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Robert Zhao 2
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Robert Zhao and Joanne Leow discuss the space of reclaimed land and how Singaporeans negotiate that space as potential and void., Joanne Leow: Why do you think it was important for people not to go in? Why do you think it’s important not for these images to be disseminated?
[0:07]
Robert Zhao: It was a very sensitive topic globally, about sand and land reclamation, and if people were enjoying themselves inside it would kind of be really a bad thing, because much of the discourse about land reclamation is the suffering, or the destruction of the other landscapes on the other side, about how communities are affected when we take so much sand away from them, and dumping it onto our own spaces, and it’s a very damaging process as well. So, I think more and more of that is coming out these days, and it’s becoming very difficult to have a decent conversation about…I mean, maybe there’s no positive way to think about land reclamation now.
[0:51]
Joanne Leow: But at that point when you were making the photographs or thinking about the surreal nature of that landscape, did you think about it in terms of like, it’s sand, it’s not quite land yet—because it always has to settle, right, before they can build stuff…
Robert Zhao: Yeah.
Joanne Leow: …and now always they build tons of stuff on it. There are no images of it, it seems to be this part of history that’s hidden, visual history—does it seem to be in a kind of in-between space? Like it used to be ocean, now it’s sand, it’s not quite land because we can’t build anything on it, so, I mean, do your photographs try and think through that? Is that what you’re—I’m just, I’m curious. Did it feel like an in-between space?
[1:29]
Robert Zhao: When I was there, no. It feels like a very new land when you reach the sea.
Joanne Leow: Why?
[1:38]
Robert Zhao: Because you can see the sea and the land meet, and it’s all manmade, you know, there’s nothing natural about it, that’s when you felt…but then you wouldn’t have the discourse about thinking about the larger implications of this process because you’re—I was really in awe of what was created when I was walking in that land. First of all, you walk so long, and there’s nothing and it’s flat, that is so unimaginable on our island. Nothing built, and there’s a horizon, I mean, so clear, and you reach the sea, and the beach there was much more beautiful than, easily, than Sentosa. This was before even the naval base was built. And I was very young then, so also it was one of the strangest experience I ever had. And it’s all new land, and it’s in the process to create. Yes it’s bad, but in the process, you create a lot of things that…for me, it was left undocumented. All the birds that came, all the marshes that was there, and a kind of different lifestyle of Singaporeans going there to do off-road riding, and huge amounts of bird-watchers go there. And for me, this, if we don’t document or talk about it, then we will never know that there was actually a little bit of engagement with that reclaimed land. Maybe it’s not important, but for me it was very interesting.
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Robert Zhao 3
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Robert Zhao and Joanne Leow discuss the difficulty of comprehending the impact of land reclamation and how time and scale function on reclaimed land., Joanne Leow: And did it change the way you looked at the island, or looked at our process of progress or development?
[0:06]
Robert Zhao: Earlier on, not so much. It was only when I started becoming more ecological in my work that I started to realize, actually, the implications of this is larger than the beautiful landscape. I find it hard to talk about those larger implications at the moment, so I haven’t found a useful way to talk about it. I try to talk about it. There was a version of the work where I say that there were mask from Indonesia found deep buried in the sand, to kind of tie it back to where they come from. I’m really interested in the aesthetics of it. I also talk about fulgurites, these things that, when lightning hits the sand, a kind of glass is formed because of the high heat, and you get that in most deserts around the world, or in America when the sand composition is correct, and Singapore being the lightning—one of the lightning capitals. So, I started to imagine that actually fulgurites were found in the reclaimed land. I think I found one or two before when I was in Tanah Merah simply because they were weird, but it was only later that people told me that it was actually a fulgurite. You won’t notice them because they just look like buried sticks in the sand after the rain. So, if you actively look for them we can find them, but not sure if it’s a possible thing to find now because it’s so hard to walk in the land. But, for me, once again, this object is a thing that is something that is created because of our reclamation and because of what we are, a lightning capital, and once again something strange is created. So, for me, I like all these things or kind of object that talks about that time or that process.
[1:58]
Joanne Leow: Because it’s so large, it’s so overwhelming, the implications of it are like, I mean, just to think about the transnational implications of it are so overwhelming—it seems to me that you’re approaching it in oblique ways, like from found objects and certain angles of photography in order to try and come to an understanding of it artistically. There’s no way you can take it all in, right, in a way.
[2:16]
Robert Zhao: Yeah, because when you’re walking—I don’t know how many people who are interested in reclaimed land actually walk in one before—because when you’re walking inside for, like, two hours, trying to reach the sea, it’s a very…for me, it was a very, the strangest ever, experience, because it’s unnatural, and there’s just so much sand! And some of the sand are stockpiled high up, like, ten meters high, and then you walk through this valley of sand, it just goes on and on, it’s like, it’s just unthinkable.
[2:57]
Joanne Leow: Do you think, in some ways, it’s almost like coming face-to-face with what globalization and development means? Like, you know how we always say, “oh, globalization,” you just use this word, right, or you just use this word “international development,” and you don’t really think about the scale. So, in some ways, it sounds to me like what you’re trying to do is to wrestle with scale. Scale, and in some ways, I guess—because in Archive, you’re thinking about time as well. So how do you relate? Is there a way to relate, to think about like, “oh my god there was so much sand, so much, so much, so much sand,” but then there’s also—this passage of time is really interesting, because you started going when you were really young, and you’ve been going for a while, and then now it’s like…
[3:39]
Robert Zhao: And I can’t go anymore.
Joanne Leow: …inaccessible, precisely. So, is there a way that your work, because it’s photography, also tries to connect that? Like there’s the framing of picture, where you’re like ‘tiny human figure—gigantic sand dunes,’ but then there’s also this like… what do you think your work is trying to say about time in that space?
[3:57]
Robert Zhao: I think that reclaimed land is a very strange beast because it only exists for five years, you know, in different parts of our island. Our island is like this perpetual sandy tropical forest surrounded by sand that’s growing, and then, you know, there’s always sand somewhere surrounding us, patching us up, for five years, and then it grows, and then five years again. There’s always these sandy parts moving here and there. Yeah, I think for photography it’s interesting that you can kind of imagine a space and time that’s before…for me, it is very easy to go back and forth or into the future with photography, because it is just—it is just the nature of the medium.
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Robert Zhao 4
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Robert Zhao and Joanne Leow talk about Zhao's photographic work and how it imitates the relationship reclaimed land has to time and scale., Robert Zhao: It’s Singapore, you’re not sure whether it has happened, or it can happen in the future. My work is not very fantastical, it’s kind of bordering—it’s very possible, but maybe it’s not, or maybe it can happen in the future.
[0:16]
Joanne Leow: Yeah, there’s a really strange odd timelessness to it. Because when you see a landscape that’s devoid of all features, like the sand dunes, then you can’t—there are no markers for you to tell, “oh this is 1990, oh this is 2000.” Because, you know, let’s say you look at the landscape of, like, Orchard Road, then you can tell—
Robert Zhao: Yeah.
Joanne Leow: —when you took the photo depending which buildings are there. But this landscape that you’re photographing and that you’re using, there’s no way. You were talking about, as well, about how it’s mobile, like the sand keeps moving, like it’s moving up, so it’s really really interesting to me how there is no way to tell, the land becomes timeless. Or do you think there are ways to tell?
[0:53]
Robert Zhao: I think it’s very hard to tell. There aren’t that many visuals of sand and land anyway, of Singapore at least.
Joanne Leow: They’re kind of taken from the aerial…
Robert Zhao: Yeah, I mean there’s—sometimes postcards will document it, but it’s not specifically trying to imagine or visualize the process.
[1:16]
Joanne Leow: Yeah, because it’s a really aerial view, so you’re kind of removed from the human scale, but that’s not what your photographs do, right. There’s a very planning eye, like Singapore must look planned, kind of visual—although when we extend it, the palimpsestic map of how far we’ve gone, your work takes us to the level of the body, to the level of eyeline, like what does it actually look like when you’re standing in the shore that keeps disappearing.
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji Interview 1
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In this clip, Shazia Hafiz Ramji discusses the circumstances of beginning to write Port of Being, her debut poetry collection and winner of the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She recounts a story of seeing a child interact with a public transit cop and how she noticed the various forms of surveillance in such a public space. She also describes visiting the Teck Gallery, where she wrote most of the poems in her collection. At the time of this interview, Ramji's collection was not yet released., Shazia Hafiz Ramji: I am Shazia Hafiz Ramji, and I write poems and stories about Vancouver.
(0:06)
Joanne Leow: I wanted to start straight off thinking about the new book that you have coming out, Port of Being, and the poems, the few that I’ve had, sort of, the honour of reading from there. What was the overarching thinking and inspiration that pushed you to write a book that was like “port of being,” so it’s like a port, but also something deeply personal as well?
(0:24)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Yeah, “the port of being” is actually a phrase from Ken Babstock’s book On Malice, and the phrase is something like, “all relation a port, a port of being,” and so I felt that was really fitting (laughs). But the book started when I left my job as a poetry editor at Talon, and a couple of days later I was just sitting at Waterfront Station and sort of absorbing the sounds and watching people, because that’s what I do, thinking about money (laughs). And I saw this little kid, he was maybe 10 or 11 years old, and the Compass Card system had just come in at that time, and he was tapping through and the transit cop saw him, and he looked at the pass and he said, “oh this isn’t your pass, who’s pass is this?” and the kid said, “oh it’s my mom’s,” and the transit cop said, “you shouldn’t be using your parents’ passes to get around through the city,” and he pointed to another cop who was, I think, an RCMP cop who was standing behind him, and he said, “you could get in trouble if you do this.” And just when that happened, it seemed so absurd to me, because, you know, he’s a kid trying to get by with his mom’s pass, you know, it’s not like he’s running away or anything. And so, I noticed this system of just how visibility and sort of surveillance was structuring the space, and then I noticed all these cameras just around that area in Waterfront Station, they’re all numbered, and just the way this hierarchical system worked and how it shaped this relation so much, and it just made me really sad. And then I started thinking about this New York artist, Vito Acconci, and he did this performance work called Following Piece where he followed somebody on the street until they entered a building or a car where he could no longer enter, and so that, to me, that was very related to what happened to the kid, because the space of access and visibility was structured so much by surveillance and policing, and just how things move in those areas that are…
(2:12)
Joanne Leow: But specifically bodies, really, like you’re thinking about how bodies move.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Exactly.
Joanne Leow: And when you were thinking about—I love that moment where it’s the kid with the Compass pass trying to get through the turnstile, basically, right? (Shazia: Yeah) When you were thinking of that, and when you started writing the rest of the poems, did you also think about, then, trans-border movements or movements within other parts of the city as well? How did that initial seed of the idea grow for you?
(2:34)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: I didn’t want to think about it so broadly, like I didn’t want to impose a kind of, this is what I want to write about. I kind of wanted to try to grasp what those kinds of structures do to our relations and our emotions, and so I thought—I think—the best way to do this would be to see how people talk about things, and to see how things move, maybe on the surface of the water and just in the city. So, I wanted to try to capture the surfaces of things and the way things move, and that’s what I did for the Container section of the book of poems. So, I sat at the Teck Gallery, there’s a view of Harbour Centre, and I watched the harbour every day from six, seven in the morning to seven in the evening or so, and I just wrote.
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji Interview 2
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji and Dr. Joanne Leow have a conversation about the ideas of bodies of water and human bodies, particularly regarding transportation and transnational flow. This progresses to a discussion about waterfront development and the way condo developers co-opt artistic / poetic language and use of imagery to sell properties., Joanne Leow: I really love how you’re equating surface—not equating, but kind of linking this idea of surface to things people say, how we talk about stuff, like almost the discourse that surrounds—but the kind of surface discourse that we just talk about when we talk about movement. What, to you in your mind, linked this idea of this movement on this placid surface of the bay…what do you make—like that linkage, I’m just so interested?
(0:23)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: I think that so much of our relations are shaped by visibility, just what we can see and what we can’t see, and so that was one aspect of surface that I was trying to give weight to. But also, I was reading this article by Charmaine Chua, which is published in a magazine called The Funambulist, which is published out of Belgium, but it’s a really great magazine about objects and design, that sort of thing. And she wrote this article about the history of the container, and in it she says—there’s this line that I’ve quoted in the book—and she says about the container that “it doesn’t matter what’s inside, it only matter that it flows.” So, this idea of circulation and visibility was really important to me to see just how these relations are formed.
(1:00)
Joanne Leow: It’s really interesting because if you think about the container, it’s contained, it’s actually just like a closed space; if you were stuck in it, that would suck.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Yeah.
Joanne Leow: But at the same time, it’s the link to these transnational flows. I was thinking about, as well, the changes to the Vancouver coastline and your poems trying to come to terms with this disorienting experience, of seeing things moving, and being on that water from being in the Teck Gallery. So, what do you think has been your experience working and writing and living in Vancouver in the past couple of years?
(1:26)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: That’s a really really big question. I feel like it’s been extremely difficult living here.
Joanne Leow: Yeah.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Just as an artist, especially, you know if you’ve—you brought this up in your talk yesterday, just the, developers using sort of poetic language and artistic language to sell the west bank. Promotional material has, you know, fight for beauty, and all these sort of…poetic—
(1:48)
Joanne Leow: That’s so disturbing.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: —artistic phrases. So, this co-optation is something that’s really bothering me, and it’s my—I think it’s my job as an artist, as somebody who’s working to understand how these systems work, to articulate how they’re working. Because in theory or in class we would talk about it in terms of complicit critique, where the critique itself is embedded, or something’s co-opted; so in order to have any way to resist, the layers of referentiality have to be articulated and broken down in order to have some sort of ground to stand on to say, “oh no.”
(2:21)
Joanne Leow: Yeah, I know. And then you’re really—then you’re working on the kind of semantic level, you’re thinking specifically about what words mean, what they can mean, what they have been used to mean.
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji Interview 3
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In this clip, Shazia Hafiz Ramji delves deeper into her inspirations for Port of Being. She explains that "Flags of Convenience" are flags of poor countries flown on corporate shipping vessels that allow these corporate ships to avoid certain fees, depending on where they port. This is contrasted with the reality that immigrants from the countries of those convenience flags are not readily accepted or welcomed into Western countries. Ramji ends by discussing how Foucault's concept of heterotopia impacted her understandings of the issues she grapples with in Port of Being., Joanne Leow: Making me think of Dionne Brand’s idea of inventory. I was just thinking of those lists, those inventories, like you keep listing stuff. I just want to hear more about what you think. Was it a conscious or unconscious choice when you started going like, “okay, I need to kind of almost enumerate what’s going on here”?
(0:13)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: It’s interesting, because I hadn’t thought about it in terms of inventories, but I was thinking about it in terms of facts and in terms of labels. Ai Weiwei did this piece in 2009, and there was an earthquake in China and he made this piece where he listed all the names of the schoolchildren who had died because, you know, the government wouldn’t take responsibility for the substandard housing that was responsible for basically killing all these kids. And so he just made a list of the names, and I was really really moved by that, to just have these facts listed, even though they’re just words, but there’s life and meaning to all these things. And so I kind of wanted to bring that into my poems a little bit, like I have this section called “Flags of Convenience”—it’s not on the elephants but it’s a really important part of the book—and the flag of convenience is basically a flag that’s flown on a ship that’s the flag of a poor country, like Panama or Liberia or something, but the ship is originating from, let’s say Denmark or a capitalistic, more developed country than Panama or Liberia or Malta or whatever. And so, the reason for flying that flag is so that they can evade taxes and quotas from the originating countries because…there’s a lot of different laws around that.
(1:23)
Joanne Leow: That’s so interesting that they would take on—if you were coming in as a refugee claimant or someone, you would not want to take in one of those flags of convenience, and yet the ships—
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Exactly.
Joanne Leow: —because they want a different kind of mobility are trying to attempt to pass, really, it’s an act of passing, right, yeah.
(1:41)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Exactly, yeah. And I was looking at workers’ reports that I just found on the internet, from the supervisors, saying, “oh there’s—the workers abandoned the ship,” these container ships, because they weren’t paid adequately or they weren’t fed adequately, and they mutinied, basically. And so it was just very very emotional to have all these facts, and the supervisor was saying things like, they couldn’t communicate because half the crew was Filipino and half the crew was Polish, and it’s just all this cheap labour on a ship flying a flag of a country that no one has any sort of connection to.
(2:11)
Joanne Leow: Obviously we talked a little bit about Vancouver, we talked about the port, and drawing those two things together, when you were writing “Flags of Convenience,” but you were also thinking about existing in this space as, like, a port city, and the kinds of ways people try to prevent people from arriving in Vancouver, prevent people from being here. What kinds of advocations or productions of space, then, do you think happen in your poems? Like when you’re thinking about those—it’s almost like a paradox, like contradiction, it’s just like immobility and mobility, it’s like the surface movement, and then yet this constant need to contain things, to keep things in the container, you need to keep people at the border. The horizons just need to stay. What spaces do you think your poems produce when you’re faced with these almost contesting forces?
(2:54)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: It’s difficult to find a word, but before I started the book I was thinking through Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, and I found it really useful. It’s one of the concepts that he brought up in his last lectures, and I found it really useful because it’s a space, the heterotopia is a space of simultaneity, and it’s a sort of palimpsestuous, layered sort of space, but it’s also a space of otherness. And so the thing that I found really interesting about the heterotopia was that he gives the example of a mirror, so let’s say I’m standing in front of the mirror, I’m constituting myself from a space of absence because I’m looking at myself in the mirror, and that’s an absent space, so I’m constituting myself from that position of absence. And so that heterotopic space that embodies absence almost has an agency when I’m thinking about migration and loss and displacement, because it brings that back to the present.
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji Interview 4
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji addresses her responsibility as a poet to articulate the complexities of space and places. She acknowledges the difficulty of accurate articulation, but nonetheless advocates in favour of such an attempt as articulation enables changes., Joanne Leow: And you’re really actually pointing a really difficult way of expressing how we exist right now in so many different spaces at the same time. Maybe one last question. When you’re thinking of contestations of space, in the city, in the waterfront, and you were talking a little bit about that, about condo developers, and asking people, “Be bold! … Make sure you get in on the rush!” When you’re thinking of those contestations, and specifically for yourself and your work, and you said you felt this responsibility to critique it, not just responsibility to critique, but how do you think your poetry enables you to inhabit the space differently?
(0:37)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: That’s really difficult, because sometimes it feels futile, because I feel—I always worry that my poems are not going to be accessible to everybody, or that they’re going to be perceived as too avant-garde, or too this or too that, whatever, right? But I…I feel like it’s the least that I can do, because there’s nothing else that I can do, really, except put my body in these sites and feel and think and articulate things, because articulating is half the problem. Once you’ve articulated something, then it gives you the power to take it back. So I feel like that was, that was half the battle for me (laughs).
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji Reading
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In this audio recording, Shazia Hafiz Ramji reads two poems from her debut poetry collection, Port of Being (winner of the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry). She reads "Khalifa" and "100 Plastic Containers for Human Corpses." Both poems consider global economic trade and policy and the intersections of those realities with lived human experiences and digital expressions of lived experience.
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Shipping Yard 2
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Photo taken inside a car. Looking at a crane and a semi-truck.
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Singapore Island Cruise Audio 1
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Audio of the ambient sounds on the Singapore Island Cruise ferry, including creaking noises, engine vibrations, water sounds, and people chatting. Duration: 0:54