change in 7 days

Adhya Ranadireksa

Deden Hendan Durahman

Henrycus Napitsunargo

Sari Asih

komvniillvminasi.blogspot.com

– Bandung, Indonesia

SB2013: if the world changed… – National Library of Singapore

“you have to be knowingly unsure, to seek certitude within the uncertain

and not pursue the uncertain with false certitude.” Ho Rui An, Several Islands

Give us a photograph, or two, or four, seven is good too – and we depict tales of a

city, a city with her bricks and whispers, her raindrops and candies, her meandering

river and sailors, her brush strokes, her cacophonous soundtrack, her unsung love

affairs, her coffee and cigarettes at the crack of dawn, her green papayas and its odor,

her hopes and ghosts, gentle and wicked…

A city we remember. Cities are not merely backdrops to the stories we tell each other

over and over again, cities are the fiber that give these stories the much needed bones

– and a pulsation, too. A jazzy pulse, or one of gamelan, or heavy metal, or tango, or

hybrids – so many cities, so many rhythms.

To remember is not the same as to commemorate – archives of the city are amnesiac

zombie entities of our memory. Graveyards are the sites where memories as we knew

them come to an end. Numbered, catalogued, put in neat folders and cabinets in

underground basements, our memories are stored to collect dust and fungus. A

memory with a pulse is a mobile memory, told or shown to others – countless times

given manifold shapes and forms.

With your help, we want to wake up the archives of the city, the city of Singapore.

The archive, then, will be turned into a library of visual memory of an ever-changing

city, rapid but meandering changes. We want to collect and show the good, the bad &

the ugly, the delicious and wreckage, the uncanny and repressed, happiness and joy of

you, you and you too, and us as well.

Archival materials are re-animated, opened-up partially, given a second life in our

library change in 7 days at the National Library of Singapore during SB2013 (and

perhaps long after there or elsewhere when we are no longer present). Visual

materials are retrieved from the city’s multiple archives to give you a chance to

connect and re-connect, browse through, borrow memories, point out to one and

another stories thought long lost and recount them anew.

We also invite you to submit images of you and your city. Wedding photos,

graduation party photos, photos of you with your family or friends and etcetera…

And we hope that your personal photos will be the many jigsaw pieces of a gigantic

puzzle that shows a biography of your city of Singapore, a city, like any other city,

with its great many stories and ambiguities. The gamut of these memoirs cannot be

overseen in a single breath.

Moreover, we – Adhya Ranadireksa, Deden Hendan Durahman, Henrycus

Napitsunargo and Sari Asih, all of us are from Bandung, Indonesia – respond in

individual, artistic ways to a selection we each make of the visual materials salvaged

from the archives and the images you kindly submitted. In so doing, we weave our

threads into this city, your city as our temporary base, a brief home from which we

return with memories, our memento mori on our homecoming to Bandung, a city with

a different beat.

Cities, certainly, are only built metaphorically in 7 days. However, 7 days is ample

time to spectacularly wipe out an entire metropolis with its sinners, specters and

samurais of the face of the earth. 7 days is also plentiful of time to alter our imagined

city. Images can move us – move us to built a city, multiple cities out of our memory

to remember, to be committed to, jointly…

Roy Voragen (fatumbrutum.blogspot.com), from Amsterdam, is a Bandung-based art

writer. Above image is a part of the technical plan for the exhibition.