Sleepwalks
Marcus Yee
Neighbourhood: Clementi

I stopped having dreams when I visited London in July. Instead, I went on nighttime walks around the city. Somnambulant London looked uncannily similar to my neighborhood in Clementi. It could have been the glow of street lights, the regularity of public housing, the sleekness of new apartment complexes — at risk of overstating equivalence. My walks perhaps traced along shared historical routes of colonial urbanisation, postwar infrastructural socialism, and today’s deterritorialised neoliberal urbanism, subjects that haunted my day-to-day work with historical archives researching Singapore’s history of urban planning. These collages are reports from my walks during the month of July. They are imprints of a translocal urban unconscious, dream-reports traced by my peripatetic body attempting to reindex memories of Clementi from within the imperial metropole. Material collected from these walks form as layers in the collage: pamphlets, tabloids, film photographs taken during the walks, automatic drawings, lined paper, postcards and photographs from an abandoned box, documentary archives, illustrations from a history book, porn magazines, food packaging labels, a 2025 calendar. The materials, subjected to a process of continuous collage and décollage that protracts the temporal immediacy of “the news,” suggests the unravelling of urban spacetime compression during these nocturnal walks. As I attempt to dream Clementi from beyond.

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BACKYARD explores the phenomenon of how events become news. This collection of reports seeks to create a spatial tapestry of “news” contributed by artists living in different parts of Singapore. By inviting them to document the happenings within their neighbourhoods within specific windows of time, BACKYARD presents artists’ documentations as news reports spanning across 12 months. Each report contributes to a year-long narrative map of Singapore, positioning the artist as reporter. BACKYARD is an art space that takes place in the form of dossiers containing news reports by Singapore based artists.