Shedding Light on Erasure
In small cities defined by rapid urbanization and modernization, the construction of a new high-rise, highway, or apartment building often comes at the expense of heritage. Today, Singapore’s last remaining traditional village, or kampong, is threatened with erasure to make room for a new highway. In an act of resistance, protest, and remembrance, The Kampong Project was born to honor Singapore’s heritage and to reflect on a way of life that has been all but lost in this rapidly urbanizing city-state.
The Kampong Project is an architectural artwork installation. This artwork uses shadow-play to depict a village that appears three-dimensional, even though it is made entirely with 2D cardboard cutouts. Using a moving light source, representative of car headlights, I show levels of a cardboard village that represents Singapore’s Kampong Lorong Buangkok. This cardboard village depicts the kampong’s 17 dirt-roadside houses, trees and other greenery, and even fishermen. When set next to a moving light source, one can “travel” through the shadow village, as if driving by it, and reflect on the village that once filled the space that the highway now occupies.
Mitra and Pauly (2009) write that “shadow art is a unique form of sculptural art where the 2D shadows cast by a 3D sculpture are essential for the artistic effect.” While conceptualizing this project, I knew from early on that I wanted to work with shadows. However, as I met with Prof. Beck and researched the village and concept more thoroughly, I realized that I did not want my shadows to appear static or lifeless. It was through this idea that I decided to reverse the definition of shadow art put forward by Mitra and Pauly (2009). Rather than creating a flat image where only the object moves, I wanted to create a scene with levels and in which the light source moves. Therefore, I decided to create an installation composed of a 2D village and a light source that moves horizontally across the scene. I hope that I will help people to recognize that architecture, and art about architecture, can also be a form of resistance art, and I hope that future work will be done to memorialize heritage that is lost to modernization. If I had more time, I would like to create a mechanical installation in which a light source is on a robotic platform that moves permanently across the scene for small scale displays of the art. I would also like to test the display using a real car light that would project the shadow against a building.
