'a refusal to submit to heartache'
'a refusal to submit to heartache'
On collective dreaming as embodied resistance, inspired by the work 'Lemas Semangat' (2024) and the writings of my friend ila.
Something churns beneath the ground in Singapore, imperceptible to most, save for those who know to listen with their bodies. This unrest, borne of the seething soil, rises from the earth and stirs within the resilient few who tread upon it.
I caught a glimpse of the fleshy pink and felt that quiver, a low rumbling in my belly as if you were turning inside me whispering your secrets in a language I could not translate. I wanted to tell X how the city woke up at odd hours of the night, fiercely alive with energies that I could never articulate and how I seemed to know which places to avoid by the way my skin folded into itself and my bones jolted in surprise. I wanted to tell X that the sensing was incomplete, unfinished and that I was an illiterate child that was never taught to read. Unlike X's father who was chosen to be part of a large family of devotees, most of us remained orphans to our own spirits.
Excerpt from ‘Tunggu Dulu’ by ila
When I first met ila, we sat talking for a long time on the dusty concrete floor of my studio in Aljunied, there was an immediate connection, a tentative closeness buffeted by an initial shyness. Somehow, I felt comfortable enough to share with her about my father, his double-life as a taoist medium and the wild occultism I was not privy to, until late into my adulthood. Even though, as a child, I could already sense this roiling wilderness in my father’s body and within my own as well.
That night as I left her studio, I thought about multiplicities of selves, stories and lives. I thought about the Ganesha idols, all of them in different sizes, coming from different places, worshipped by different individuals and ending up on that rack. These idols were carried by the same sea that extinguished the paper boats that brought me here to X.
Excerpt from ‘Tunggu Dulu’ by ila
It was probably during this first encounter that I had my first intersection with the artwork ‘Lemas Semangat’ and perhaps even became one of its many tributaries. ‘Lemas Semangat’ is less a singular piece than it is a broken body, salvaged by ila, lovingly and stubbornly. This work is fascinating as it began as a set of coordinates, Jalan Tenteram1 to be exact, which then became a trail and then a map. It is in essence a cartography of erasure, by the State and those of us who continue to stand back and let the absences grow.
‘Tenteram Latitude’ by ila and madam data, Released under my label ‘Endless Return’
When ila shared her piece ‘Tunggu Dulu’ with me (where I am admittedly the designated mysterious miss X) I was immediately transported by her writing. ila is a skilful storyteller and as adept a collector of stories as she is at telling and weaving them. Her writing often has a meandering and divergent quality, which is true to the searching nature of her research and the invisible pathways that she traces in search of things long forgotten.
From that day, I kept coming back to the same place, possessed by an impatience to find an ending to some story that was not mine.
Excerpt from ‘Tunggu Dulu’ by ila
I can also describe our walks in the same manner, we have never managed to walk a straight path when we are together, often teetering between thresholds of unseen energies. ila is someone who is moved by sense and not by sight, it is her body that often finds itself in pursuit of answers to questions unspoken. As we roam, I often feel adrift; her ignorant sidekick, filling the gaps of my own disjointed understanding with that which she freely shares or that emerges from the land around us. It is on one of these walks of ours that I am so fond of, that I gained more proximity to the body of work ‘Lemas Semangat’.
Over his shoulder, a makeshift rack caught my eye. It was a common sight to see idols scattered around the outskirts of the beach. Sometimes placed under the trees or on the rocks. This rack however had about twenty over idols, Ganeshas of different sizes and shapes. They were all placed together with such care on the precariously slanted rack. Some had barnacles growing on them. All of them were intact.
Excerpt from ‘Tunggu Dulu’ by ila
It was first the row of Ganesha statues that struck me, only because ila pointed them out to me as we were strolling along the beach in Punggol. I remember saying to her “it smells like real beach here”, greedily taking in the briny smell of the salt air. Disrupting the kampong-esque idyll of the beach was a small police outpost stationed close to the water, presumably to arrest non-citizens who gamely dared to swim over from the oil-slicked shores of Johor Bahru, whose industrial smoke we could see looming thick in the horizon from not too far from us.
…
I remember that day well, the sun was bright in a way that was almost blinding, the water in the ocean had a screensaver like quality to it, shockingly blue. A group of laughing children were catching hermit crabs and placing them in plastic bottles. It felt nostalgic, in a cruel way. I remember ila with her film camera, making her way across the beach with a seasoned familiarity, ducking under thick foliage and climbing over rocks. This stretch of beach, ominously and perhaps too aptly known as “Punggol’s End” has a brutal past, for on 28 February 1942, some 400 Chinese Civilians, victims of the Sook Ching purge, were killed by the Japanese on this northeastern shore2. Previously a no-man’s land, Punggol is now a highly developed residential area populated by bike paths, seafood restaurants and freshly painted new housing developments.
These Ganesha statues make an appearance in the film essay ‘Lemas Semangat’ by ila which is part of a larger longstanding research project in which she traces the origins and disappearances of ‘keramats’ and shrines in Singapore. To break it down simply, a ‘keramat’ is an object, living or otherwise, that is like conduit or container for ‘semangat’ (soul, energy or life-source, vital force3).
*etymology: keramat
كرامة (karama): diginity
Indonesian: holy, sacred
Noun (Malay):
glory (gift from god)
purity and blessing of one’s glory which leads to their prayers being answered by God
a saint
Adjectives (Malay): Holy
Definitions of keramat, transcribed from ila’s book of archival material
In the video-essay, ila re-stages an interview with the uncle who cleans that part of the beach who has by providence become a reluctant custodian of these relics. I love this interview with the caretaker of the Ganeshas, who has reflexively committed to rescuing them from the ocean for fear of them drowning.
This is one of my most beloved stories in ila’s repertoire, a simple account of human compassion, which also unearths the problematic manner by which the state deals with spiritual or supernatural relics. Oftentimes leaving their destruction or fate to the “common folk” to decide, exposing them to the potential repercussions of karmic retribution by the “upstairs”. This allegory informs my reading of the title of the work 'Lemas Semangat' which can be read as to ‘Drowned Spirits’ in english, a metaphor for submerged histories and spirits lost. This “not my problem” mentality or practice of shifting accountability or consequence to a layperson is an imperialist byproduct, where those at the bottom become collateral damage in service of some higher power, whether it be god or man.
In ila’s incredible collection of news articles, documented in an old accounts book, not unlike the kind used by my late grandfather, there is an extensive archive “made up of all the collected newspaper articles (some as early as the 1920s), images and notes of other local shrines that still exist or have been removed4”. The implication of storing all these receipts of removal, is that ila is conscientiously keeping the score of these seemingly isolated and oft disregarded incidents, highlighting and plotting infractions of land violence enacted by the State in the interests of upholding its own mythos of capital.
The germ of this project actually started with ila’s search for the shrine of Siti Subaida, a Malay woman purported to be a magical healer or bomoh5 of sorts, which had been buried in the area around which she lives.
What happened to it? Oh, I am not sure. They just removed it when they were building those flats right there. This shrine very strong magic one, but not strong enough to beat the system…
Quote from Lemas Semangat (With Annotations)- Chapter One: mulut ke mulut by ila
The video which showed as part of Some Exercises in Futility curated by Berny Tan for Singapore Art Week 2024 is one of my favourite works of ila’s to date. The filmic essay traces in a conversational, non-linear and non-didactical fashion, the slow disappearances of ‘keramats’ in Singapore and their legacies of worship. ‘Keramats’, which used to be considered sacred objects, have now diminished in value, seen as eyesores, “wasted land” or trash to be eradicated by the State. The exhibition Some Exercises in Futility was held in an industrial warehouse situated somewhere between the Geylang and Aljunied area. The breathable space with its large windows and access to natural light was a refreshing departure from the garden-variety of galleries with bad lighting, atypical of the art viewing experience in Singapore.
‘Lemas Semangat’ is looped on a large screen in portrait orientation. Framing the screen is a red cloth that extends long on both sides, arranged on the ground in a manner that encircles the body when you sit down to watch the video, it is a surprisingly tender gesture. The colour and sensuousness of the fabric lends an intimate yet ritual quality to the work. Somehow, looking at the cloth brings to me an instance in Ang Kor Wat, Cambodia where I was oddly touched by the image of a sleeping headless buddha covered by a brocade fabric6. This fabric which is a striking shade of red is a running motif within this work, draped and interwoven between trees and stretched across coastlines like a stream of blood. As the video runs, it takes us across a landscape of contradictions, we are confronted with static footage of incessant pruning and trimming of plantscape in relation to stark and remote images of ravaged trees, swampland and backwater. I also find the tightness of the vertical crop intriguing, as it restricts our view of the landscape, obscuring our sense of place. It's not unusual, in fact, when capturing a photograph in Singapore that showcases "nature," to deliberately crop or omit elements of urbanization, when the reality is that in Singapore, there exists a border and a civilized marker for everything.
In my country, things are always disappearing in pursuit of the State’s aspirations to consummate itself. Buildings, people, and trees vanish before our very eyes as the terrain steadily flattens out. As a result of this erasure, our history and identity, which are tied directly to our embodied memories of place and time, also become plain and barren. There is a tale of the 'Singapore Stone' in the video, a mythological object purported to hold great power that was eventually used as scrap material for roads and even as a footstool for a British officer living at Fort Canning. This reveals a longstanding contempt for the history and legacy of these sacred relics, an inherited ailment of our colonial past.
Through reclamation, the island's borders grew from its other parts, flattened and stretched until it too became thin and transparent, the lucent island, the ghost island that is forgetful, that is forgotten. To be a land-scarce city is to have all land marked out, accounted for, and regulated.
Excerpt from Lemas Semangat (with annotations)- Chapter Three: Beringin by ila
This violence happens often without any of us noticing, there are also many who recognize but do not resist. Singaporeans who come back from overseas are always saying to me “wah it looks different yet same” or upon catching glimpse of something in the backseat of some moving car will comment “eh, was that building here before?” or “didn’t that condominium use to be…”. Perhaps that is the rotten root of the problem, that to maintain our gleaming modernity, Singapore has to cannibalize its own land through persistent reclamation, constant development and the skinning and gutting of old buildings and architecture.
In ila’s work she often incorporates fabric in relation to body, such as in her earlier performance work ‘Rahim7’ for the group exhibition Merayakan Murni (2016) in Bali which interrogated perceptions around the female body or that one time I watched her perform live last year at ITBA Festival in her work “Masah, Masalah (Time, Problem)” in which she moved under a molten black fabric.
Cloth as an adaptable medium yields easily to the body’s shape, while concealing and obscuring its features. Cloth is thus used as intermediary which ila can transfigure the body into something other than human, conjuring an otherworldly topography. Also, ila is a Pisces, a water sign, so for her to have an affinity with a liquid medium such as cloth does not surprise me, her works also tend to revolve around or feature bodies of water.
If ‘semangat’, or energy is formless, cloth can be used to show how form is contained. The fabric wraps around parts of the surrounding environment as well, clinging to surfaces, creating spillages, taking on new silhouettes. In a particular compelling segment of the video essay (of which there are many) ‘semangat’ is described as a type of “collective dreaming”8 and that it “can weaken when the collective body breaks apart9”. As the spatium — ‘keramat’ that holds the intensity — ‘semangat’ is destroyed, the ‘semangat’ is dispersed and clings onto smaller discrete objects and weakened. Perhaps we can use the Deleuzian concept of BwO; Body without Organs to try and understand the behavior or characteristics of ‘semangat’, an amorphous material. If we define ‘semangat’ as energy or intensity, it can possess a dynamic tendency or latent potential that circulates within a larger distributed body, animated by other living beings and through the projection of their desires.
“A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree — to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced.”
Excerpt from A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
"The body without organs is full of 'gaps' or 'holes' that are not empty but rather filled with intensities"
Excerpt from A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
In preparation for the work, ila created lifelike gel or latex casts of her face. Which she then performs with in the later half of the film. Her body is shrouded by the red cloth while the rubber moulds are affixed to various parts of the body. In one scene, she stands amidst a pile of broken logs, arms outstretched, swaying, no longer herself, but a ghost, full of dislocations. The sleeping faces appear weathered and soft, they look tired yet have a air of mournful tranquility about them, as if to say “let it pass, let it pass”. In the last scene of the film, ila herself is submerged in water, but a swimming pool, a man-made water body. The masks drift away from her and her actual face is finally revealed. ‘Semangat’ that exists in all living beings, is essentially an extension of us, an embodiment of our life force, if we let it drown, we ourselves become caught in a samsaric slipstream of unending violence and apathy.
In the systemic destruction of 'keramats' and cultural artefacts, the spirits and drives of the people become mute. We grow accustomed to this silence, a pervasive emptiness that we accept as the status quo, even in our speech that the colonizers turned into lingua franca, a tool for governance. Stripping language of its ‘semangat’, its propagative capacity, diminishes its capacity for creativity, beauty and art.
During my stay in Indonesia, I am discovering numerous connections between the Malay and Indonesian language as I'm currently learning Bahasa. Both languages were significantly influenced and standardized by the colonial powers that governed the Malay archipelago. Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch, while Singapore and Malaysia were under British rule. During the colonial era, both languages absorbed vocabulary from the colonial languages, though they exhibit slight differences in pronunciation, spelling, and usage. As a result, a word like 'semangat' may carry different meanings in Indonesia compared to its usage in the context of this work. For instance 'Lemas Semangat' in malay roughly translates to 'Drowned Spirit,' whereas in Indonesian, 'semangat' is used as a form of encouragement, akin to the mandarin expression 'jiayou!' or '加油,' or 'don't give up!' Whatever the case, whichever way I translate it, the essence of the phrase is still the same:
Lemas Semangat (Indonesian): Weak motivation
Lemas Semangat (Malay): Drowned spirit
Aside from 'semangat', another word 'dolat' recurs in the work. My Indonesian friend and myself draw blanks as to its meaning as we discuss the work upon its viewing. 'Dolat' does not exist in the Indonesian lexicon, the roots of this word are revealed in ila’s scrapbook, the bedrock of this project, that defines 'dolat' as a word derived from 'kedaulatan' (Malay) for 'sovereignty', also from the Arabic root word 'doulah' to denote 'of the highest power' or 'doulat' for 'ruler or custodian of a place'. ‘Dolat’ thus can be inferred as a kind of protective power, that perhaps metes consequence or reparative justice on those who wish harm upon the land, an inbuilt defence mechanism.
“But I feel nowadays dolat has weakened, the people have forgotten.”
Lemas Semangat (2024), ila
Here in Solo, I have been hounding my aforementioned friend Achri a lot about the concept of 'jiwa', a word that he taught me, which means 'soul' in Indonesian. In exchange, I try to explain 'semangat', for which I have been drawing parallels, even though he claims that it is not *quite the same. Recently, I also learned another term from Melati, 'taksu', which is defined as the power of our presence or the soul of the dancer/performer. In tradition, the Javanese say 'taksu' is a spirit that is given or a birthright. I have learned in my time here that 'taksu' is something that can be trained and cultivated to strengthen the presence and charisma of the performer. Perhaps this is not dissimilar to 'kuatkan semangat', to ‘strengthen our semangat'. To do this, we must remain steadfast in our collective remembering. To make a conscious choice in our refusal to submit to heartache, to allow the grief to churn within us and move us. For even as the world around us persists in its own destruction, if we semangat!!!, something precious will prevail, enduring beyond the gaps and absences.
Lemas dolat, lemas semangat.
There is loss and pain in the dreaming (*****) but there is refusal in accepting these feelings of heartache. Maybe there is a desire for us to gather and remember, to kuatkan semangat, and grieve.
Excerpt from Lemas Semangat (with annotations)- Chapter Three: Beringin by ila
Lemas Semangat (2024)
Single Channel Video
Duration: 34:56 Mins
The term semangat, which is often mistranslated from Malay as a soul of a living thing, refers to the energy that is traditionally believed to exist in all living beings. It may also inhabit or be manifested in keramat, translated as shrines, which therefore have a deep connection to their physical location; serving as vessels for its vital force. In Singapore’s rapidly shifting urban environment, however, many such keramat have disappeared, deemed less important than the perceived socioeconomic needs of the city. This video explores these lost keramat, attempting to surface them from various ghost topographies, archival fragments, conversations, and memories. Meditating on the lemas – or weak – semangat, the artist wonders if the accumulation and distribution of the archives can have the same effect as the original keramat; if it can function as resistance against the treatment of the land and its inhabitants. “How does one locate an absence?” a voice asks early in the video. “How does one reclaim amorphous earth slipping through temporalities into ghosts and silences [...]?”
(Text by Berny Tan)
ila is a visual and performance artist whose intimate works incorporate archives, moving images and live performance. Negotiating alternative nodes of experience, her works reconfigure and merge speculative fiction with factual histories, informal archives and collective experiences, conceiving them as sites for empathy and connectivity.
Suggested Reading:
Lemas Semangat (With Annotations)- Chapter One: mulut ke mulut
Lemas Semangat (with annotations)- Chapter Two: tuhan//hantu
* Previously published in Portside Review's #6 Rocking the Boat in 2022
With updated annotations from ila.
Jalan Tenteram is a neighbourhood in Singapore located in the Kallang/Whampoa
HDB Estate
Lemas Semangat (2024), ila
Lemas Semangat (With Annotations)- Chapter One: mulut ke mulut
Lemas Semangat (2024), ila
The locals had covered the buddha figure with a cloth like a blanket. Many of the artifacts in Angkor Wat had been stolen by European colonial powers and even the Khmer Rouge.
She performed this work when she was pregnant with Inaya
Lemas Semangat (2024), ila
Lemas Semangat (2024), ila
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