Chloe Chetz Tan
I intend for this video to act as a time capsule, it comprises a series of short clips I had taken these clips before my country had gone into its second lockdown in May 2021. It is meant to serve as a marker to indicate the present baseline of nature in the city. It spans across the procession of the least degraded point to the most degraded point available: going from nature that has been preserved from centuries before (situated in heritage sites) and towards nature that has been hybridised within the human inhabited urbanity. The materiality and audio recordings of in conjunction with the culturalplaces of these depictions intends to incite thought, to provoke and to bring about questions in response. I believe that in a city that is in a perpetual mode of construction, demolition and reconstruction, these forms of nature, despite it being of human teleology, preservation and construction to various degrees, will one day become the least degraded point despite it being the most degraded at present.
At the Nexus of Nature & Culture:
Of Play, Environmental Proclivities & Perspectives, within the Biophilic Anthropocene in Singapore
Due to the nature of my dissertation, which focused on children as the main subjects interacting with the space, I have chosen to omit topics that I had touched on that were of relation to them. For ethical reasons, I have decided to focus on a particular chapter (of perception and shifting baselines) that I believe captures an integral aspect of relatedness and most importantly, does not involve any photography or videography of children for my blog post.
Old growth relics that once graced the land; roots intertwined in soil; serene and dormant; though in a silent slumber of their own; a home to friends of various flora and fauna - the architect that is mother nature is complexly brilliant and a constant giver. But what becomes of it when culture decides to methodically dissect, commodify it into a resource, and preen it into new forms that nature itself is unable to produce on its own? This was one of the main lines of enquiry in my dissertation - it sought to discuss the anthropological concept of the nature/culture divide within the site context of Singapore’s approach to greening.
The authoritarian approach towards planning, and its subsequent effects in the careful curation of the greening of the city, has established human agency as the dominant party within the power dynamics of human-nature relations and has set an unstoppable precedence in being a large contributing factor to the construction of the nation’s natural landscape.
Endless streetscapes of wildflowers blooming by roadsides as cars speed on by; green glossy leaves scintillating under a sweltering equatorial heat; a smorgasbord of concrete, soil, flora and fauna, sprawled about in pockets and woven vertically and horizontally in a manicured fashion across a land constrained 725 square kilometres of high rise builds. On the surface, this seems to tout tremendous benefits for the human inhabitants in the city. But little is thought of its relation to a system that has been expertly constructed and bolted in place. In the process of its construction, natural forests have been made into sacrificial lambs: the deforestation to re-materialisation to artificial greenery pipeline transforms what we once knew of nature into novel shades and shapes of green. They slowly creep back into the city by no means organically, with the aim to restore the loss in nature that human processes are culpable of. This is silently malicious - not only do we lose a biodiverse body of species, we also lose touch of our memories and perceptions of what nature once was. When the manicurification of nature as a form of protection is merely a bandaid equivalent of a solution, we end up losing the benefits that nature provides for possibilities of wild unfettered and free play, the knowledge and understanding of nature-kind and contact with the very core of nature.
Preened and pruned, the curatorial nature of this newfound greenery censors the harm happening behind the scenes, manicuring an outcome that further distances us from the truth. This is where the ideological concept of shifting baselines takes into effect. It posits that each generation in its youth takes the degraded condition of the natural landscape as the non-degraded condition. When presented with this new reality, our limited capacity to preserve the memory of becomes very ripe for the picking of accepting this alternative landscape.
Of Play, Environmental Proclivities & Perspectives, within the Biophilic Anthropocene in Singapore
Due to the nature of my dissertation, which focused on children as the main subjects interacting with the space, I have chosen to omit topics that I had touched on that were of relation to them. For ethical reasons, I have decided to focus on a particular chapter (of perception and shifting baselines) that I believe captures an integral aspect of relatedness and most importantly, does not involve any photography or videography of children for my blog post.
Old growth relics that once graced the land; roots intertwined in soil; serene and dormant; though in a silent slumber of their own; a home to friends of various flora and fauna - the architect that is mother nature is complexly brilliant and a constant giver. But what becomes of it when culture decides to methodically dissect, commodify it into a resource, and preen it into new forms that nature itself is unable to produce on its own? This was one of the main lines of enquiry in my dissertation - it sought to discuss the anthropological concept of the nature/culture divide within the site context of Singapore’s approach to greening.
The authoritarian approach towards planning, and its subsequent effects in the careful curation of the greening of the city, has established human agency as the dominant party within the power dynamics of human-nature relations and has set an unstoppable precedence in being a large contributing factor to the construction of the nation’s natural landscape.
Endless streetscapes of wildflowers blooming by roadsides as cars speed on by; green glossy leaves scintillating under a sweltering equatorial heat; a smorgasbord of concrete, soil, flora and fauna, sprawled about in pockets and woven vertically and horizontally in a manicured fashion across a land constrained 725 square kilometres of high rise builds. On the surface, this seems to tout tremendous benefits for the human inhabitants in the city. But little is thought of its relation to a system that has been expertly constructed and bolted in place. In the process of its construction, natural forests have been made into sacrificial lambs: the deforestation to re-materialisation to artificial greenery pipeline transforms what we once knew of nature into novel shades and shapes of green. They slowly creep back into the city by no means organically, with the aim to restore the loss in nature that human processes are culpable of. This is silently malicious - not only do we lose a biodiverse body of species, we also lose touch of our memories and perceptions of what nature once was. When the manicurification of nature as a form of protection is merely a bandaid equivalent of a solution, we end up losing the benefits that nature provides for possibilities of wild unfettered and free play, the knowledge and understanding of nature-kind and contact with the very core of nature.
Preened and pruned, the curatorial nature of this newfound greenery censors the harm happening behind the scenes, manicuring an outcome that further distances us from the truth. This is where the ideological concept of shifting baselines takes into effect. It posits that each generation in its youth takes the degraded condition of the natural landscape as the non-degraded condition. When presented with this new reality, our limited capacity to preserve the memory of becomes very ripe for the picking of accepting this alternative landscape.