Join writer Amanda Lee Koe for her performance lecture as she considers stories of agency, urgency and futurism.
Maybe she’s born with it; maybe she’s relentlessly pursued extensive body modifications ever since the pubescence of independence from her colonial overlords. You name it, our girl's done it—land augmentations, coastline fillers, swamp reductions, urban facelifts, highest per capita installed rate of air-conditioning in Southeast Asia. She’s utilised high-tech ingenuity and cosmopolitan hybridity to transition from her assigned embodiment (diminutive, devoid of natural resources, suffocatingly hot and humid) towards her deepest and truest expression of selfhood. And she has achieved spectacular results, be it the self-sufficiency of alchemising her own waste materials into potable water or the powerplay of displaying “exotic” temperate flora from Western climes in luxury greenhouses. She’s unabashedly aspirational. The sky’s the limit.
But something is holding Singapore back from manifesting to her fullest potential and brightest radiance: her ritualised shame. For how can she be who is, own who she is, while hiding the fact that she is trans and a cyborg?
“A Cyborg Island Manifesto” (after Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto from 1985) operates from a position of provocation, a subversion of normative narratives and a reappraisal of reproductive futurities. It is a call to cultural workers and engaged citizens to support and affirm our city-state’s freedom, agency and urgency to come out—and flourish—as Other within a generative glitch, laying out a decolonial framework for Tropical Queer Time, a hot zone in which we vigorously participate in art-making, story-telling, exhibition-making and life-living.
VENUE: National Gallery Singapore (City Hall Chamber)
ADDRESS: 1 St Andrew's Rd, #01 – 01, Singapore 178957
EVENT WEBSITE: National Gallery Singapore
DATE AND TIME
8 Oct 2022, 4pm-5pm