Charles Lim 3
Details
Charles Lim 3
Metadata (MODS) |
|
|---|---|
| Titles | Charles Lim 3: Clip 3 |
| Name | Charles Lim |
| Name | Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Type of Resource | sound recording-nonmusical |
| Genre | Interview |
| Identifier | Interview |
| Identifier | Charles Lim 3 |
| Abstract | Charles Lim discusses Singapore's Foreshores Act and the process of reclamation. He talks about how the coastline has changed over the course of his life. |
| Extent | 7:05 |
| Form | sound recording |
| Note | Joanne Leow: Come back to the question of the Foreshores Act. So we were saying it’s not a narrative in that sense. I mean, yes, the government is so full of official narratives of Singapore “a fishing village, now look at us,” right, but that Act is— Charles Lim: But that is completely invisible. Joanne Leow: Yes. Charles Lim: They don’t want people to know about it. Joanne Leow: Yeah, and they don’t—and so, what do you see? Your art is a form of resistance against that totality, so I guess what do you see the Act—you said it’s invisible—what else do you see it as? [0:29] Charles Lim: Okay, we can look into the history of the Foreshores Act. What’s really interesting about the Foreshores Act is that it was…you know, usually there’s this very polemic kind of argument—so, maybe now you call it the Global South, and Europe, you know, and the West. They did all these horrible things to us and all that, and now you see some—you know, with Trump and all that—some fight back, actually. And, in a sense, I feel that that argument is becoming more and more generalized; it’s quite horrible, actually. I don’t think people are just…you can’t say a whole bunch of people are just horrible, like “all white people are terrible.” And what’s interesting about the Foreshores Act is when you look at it…when the law was introduced, it was in 1880—1875, I think. [1:13] Joanne Leow: 1876. Charles Lim: ’76. Actually, when you do some research on it, I don’t think it was called the Foreshores Act at that point. It was called, like, the Ports and Harbours…maybe check on that. Because right now I’m going through a colonial proclamation, actually. And what’s interesting is that it was actually introduced by the East India Company. Singapore was under the East India Company at the time. And just imagine your country…you know, if your law is based on Google coming to your community and setting up a bunch of laws… Joanne Leow: It’s a corporation. [1:45] Charles Lim: This is our legacy. And what’s really interesting is that when I looked at—in UK, I’m trying to look for the Foreshores Act in UK—they don’t have it. I don’t think they have it. They have the Crown lease, it’s under the king, the queen, the king. But I need to look into that more. So, it’s obviously a colonial thing, and there are several things that are interesting in it. One is called—I think within the sections there’s one part that says that “if you—if a community owns land along the coastline of the state, the state can take away that property from the community, actually, for the defense of the state.” So what happened was that the British actually had this law, but they didn’t really use it to the maximum, but what happened was that when Singapore became independent, and then…in the ‘70s, actually—this is something of a show that I did with Mustafa, actually, and you asked me…this show called “in search of raffles’ light,” because we were looking through Straits Times newspaper articles, and then we found out that it didn’t reflect really—the articles didn’t reflect—what my experience of the sea was. And then later on we found out that actually if you look in the archives of Singapore in the ‘70s, it was actually very vibrant, there are a lot of people having activities in the sea, there was like sea events that were like Golay races, with communities that were not from Singapore, from the Riau islands, from Batam, and hence the problem with Singapore is nation building. And the sea was actually quite porous, in a sense, the relationship was very porous. And what happened was that all these people got moved, through this law, actually, got moved into the center of Singapore. And I think there were MPs, actually, representing islands along the coast, and they actually want my—components of my house, Mata Ikan was actually…but they didn’t really use the Foreshores Act, they just reclaim that, and then from there it became…and then the other law within the Foreshores Act, I think it’s section five, is it, or three…it’s called a proclamation. And I think that is really interesting. What happens is that the president of Singapore actually goes there, and then he does a proclamation. But before that, what happens is that—it’s really interesting—when you do the proclamation, when you do the reclamation, they do reclamation and they drop sand in the sea—maybe I can show you some video. This is kind of like the first part of proclamation. [4:03] Joanne Leow: So then the president goes there to the shore and… Charles Lim: No, not really, so what happens is that they’re dropping sand in the sea, it’s just literally dropping sand— Joanne Leow: Yeah. [4:10] Charles Lim: —in the sea. And then the sand is in the sea, and then there’s water, and then at some point in time the sand actually breaks through the water, and it becomes land, physically it’s land, you know, as a sailor you’re like, I take a boat, I go there, I see land. I can’t go any further. But what’s really interesting is that if you look at the chart in Singapore it says that being reclaimed works in progress. So, that land actually legally is not land yet. And this is actually being confirmed with an engineer that I know from Surbana, actually. And what happens is that that land is not legally land because the land is too unstable. If you build anything on it, things sort of collapse, or move, ropes will actually break apart. And what happens is that on the reclaimed land, there are these machines out there, on the east coast of Singapore, they use this machine called CPT, Core Penetrative Test, or Cone Penetrative Test. And then on the west side it’s by JTC, it’s another company, they use a data process that’s called Soil Investigation Test. And the East Side, what happens is the soil investigation test, is they drop this machine in there and they pull up core samples. Sand, material that they find from the ground, and they bring it to the lab, and then they find, okay, then they research like… [5:27] Joanne Leow: What’s in there… Charles Lim: …what’s—whether the sand is stable or not, or the land is stable or not. On the other side the lab, it’s actually on the land. Both instances when I encountered these people, they are actually from Myanmar, these geologists, they are from Myanmar. Because what happened was that when Singapore became independent, we had—the NUS department had a geology lab. And the…our ministers actually thought that, “Singapore, we’re not into coal mining, we’re not into…why should we have a geology lab?” So, they actually shrunk the geology lab, so we don’t have enough geologists in Singapore. So, what happened was that we started getting a lot of geologists from Myanmar, actually, and from outside Singapore. So, mainly these people are from there. But now, recently, actually, NUS has increased their…they realized this, so they increased their geology lab. So what happens is that they have these machines out there, and these people are measuring the solidity of sand, it’s just something I’m particularly interested in, measuring, measuring, measuring. I think it takes something like, in the past it was like four years, and then now they’ve dropped to something like two years because they have all these new methods of making the sand compress faster, like putting pipes in the water, in the sand, or plastic. And what happens is that that data is collected, and is given to a certain department within HDB—the apartments they are doing, the reclamation—the HDB, military, or JTC. I’m not too sure what this part is, because I tried contacting the people that are doing this; in JTC I think there’s a department called the Land Reclamation Design Unit, and I think there’s only like four or three people inside. |
| Access Condition | Contact Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Subject Geographic | Pacific Ocean |
| Subject Hierarchical Geographic | Asia--Singapore------Singapore |
| Subject Local Name | ----Coast--Environmental Degradation--Foreshores Act--Water--Pacific Ocean-- |