5forSG55

August. The month we celebrate Singapore. Usually I get all hyped up when this month rolls round because I am really so proud to be a Singaporean. However this year the feeling is just different. Maybe it is because we are in a pandemic. Perhaps it is the negativity surrounding this year's election that had rubbed off me the wrong way. Or it could be that I was disappointed that the NDP committee had decided to provide a funpack for every household despite designating 2019 as the Year Towards Zero Waste. I guess my decision to opt-out of collecting said funpack also did nothing to add to the usual festive mood of the month. Hmm.... the biggest reason might be the grief of losing a dear colleague most unexpectedly just before the month began. 😢

Regardless of my personal feelings, the country was certainly in celebration mode. Practically every other post on my Facebook news feed was about a National Day promotion or a special 55 related offer or screaming red and white or a gratitude note that I might have written myself. The one post that really got my attention was one with #5forSG55 - a challenge to gather a group of 5 to pick 5 bags of trash from our East Coast Beach as a way to celebrate National Day.

As a diver, I am particularly aware of how our usage of plastic is causing harm to our seas. My first attempt at a beach cleanup was on a stretch of pebble beach in Bali after reading about #2minutebeachclean. There had been news about how the monsoon had been bringing in an incredible amount of trash to our shores and I knew I wanted to help somehow. The challenge just provided even more motivation for me to make this journey to the east. 😂 Thus I promptly joined the telegram group and created my own group. 

I was quite ready to do it solo but *surprise surprise* someone actually joined my group! And between the 2 of us we collected 7 bags of trash in under 2 hours. The best part of this cleanup was being able to encourage a stranger to help out with just our actions! We had been working silently and separately in a bid to cover as much ground as possible when someone approached my new friend to ask what we were doing and then if he could help! I gave him a pair of extra gloves I had and a recycled plastic bag and he went right to work!

A week later, I joined another group to do some "beach forensic examination" during which our focus was to document the source of the trash found on our shores. Unsurprisingly, most of the identified trash came from neighbouring countries but there were definitely some local trash too. In a shorter period of about 45 minutes, I bagged one plastic bag worth of trash. The best part of this cleanup was when 2 young girls approached me to clarify what I was doing. It so warmed my heart to see the acknowledgement in their eyes that what I was doing was not in vain. They started their own cleanup there and then.

Before the month was up, I organised another beach cleanup when some of my own friends decided that they wanted to do their part too!! This time round, I booked the use of Cleanpod 

                    

and really leveled up equipment-wise with a cart, weighing scale, pails, tongs and even sieves! The area we worked at did not have the usual large trash so I made full use of the available sieve and went after the microplastics! After about an hour's work, the 5 of us actually bagged just over 5 bags for SG55! 6.7 kg of tiny plastic and styrofoam kept out of the stomachs of sea creatures! But the best part of this cleanup had to be the ice cold beer we had before we even began work. 🤣

The plastic issue is such a humongous problem. I had been a lot more passionate about speaking against it in previous years. I wonder if I am becoming a little numb to it because you see it everywhere, even in the streets, by the roadside, on communal tables in void deck. Can I collect them all? Do my actions really make a difference? I don't have an answer to that. I just know I cannot do nothing at all.

Please stop trashing our planet.

 

what does it mean?

Over the weekend, I attended a performance-installation curated as part of Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) 2019. I had always enjoy art somewhat, I am a dancer after all and my first out-of-the-world experience at Singapore Biennale 20?? is still deeply etched in my mind. But I don't usually actively seek out artistic performances or exhibitions to attend. What I do catch, often and largely, depends on my much more artsy gal pal Geri. Come to think of it, almost all of the paid artistic performances I attended were with her! 😄

I was actually slightly reluctant to catch this particular one when she first suggested it to me, probably because I was feeling kind of broke and didn't really want to spend unnecessarily. But it had been a while since we met and her recommendations had never failed so far so I said "yes!" to ST/LL. This post is not a review on it. But here is an incredibly well-written review on it if that's what you want. I hope my writing skills reach that level sometime in the near future... but anyway my post is more about the thoughts and emotions it had evoked in me.

First of all, I should have noticed the ingenious subtlety of its title way earlier than 10 minutes before the start of the performance. But I did not. It was only when we were seated and perusing the programme booklet did it hit me like a ton of bricks (ok, maybe not that hard, it is subtle after all). I had assumed it was some kind of acronym or code - ST = standard and LL = long lens?!?! but it was a play of the word STILL.

Before I share the director's (Shiro Takatani) explanation of it, I need to put it out there this recurring thought/dream/imagery that I have been replaying in my mind for years. Consider a bowl of marbles. It can be a very serene scenario of pretty marbles sitting in a bowl. Then consider the bowl being upturned and that direct opposite of serenity as the marbles dispersed in all directions. Sometimes, there are marbles, other times there had been liquid, water, seeds, sticks etc. But always this replay of containment versus .... chaos? release? I could not make sense of it. I know there is some truth or knowledge or understanding to be gained from it. Something about the crazily minuscule point between the two states but I could not figure it out all these years. I had tried posing this odd "question" to just 2 people who I thought might have an answer for me but it is still unraveling to this day...

So... try and understand just how big my eyes widened as I read these words from the director:

ST/LL is taken from the word "still". The slash signifies a sense of being "in between" - for example, being between one moment and the next - and expresses the fluctuations between being tranquil or stationary to being busy or in motion. The slash also alludes to the idea to what extent can we recognise a very short amount of time?

I was ordained to watch this performance! By then, I literally could not wait for it to begin. Unfortunately, perhaps because I was not in the pink of health at that moment, I never quite got into a state of "meditation on silence" during the performance. My mind just refused to take a back seat and I was constantly trying to "make sense" and explain to myself what my eyes and ears were taking in. It really was a very arresting visual display. I was totally in awe with the technicalities, lighting and use of multimedia. [How in the world do they superimpose delayed or reversed images on a live stream?!?] However I much preferred the gentle swishing of water as the performers moved across the shallow pool onstage to the almost-oppressive music composition by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

At the end of it, I still had no answer. Perhaps there was never meant to be an answer? Or perhaps I had not properly formulated a question yet? In any case, I thought this was a perfect example of how art is the only way to express something that can never be fully explained in words, of any language. You can only experience it.



PS: Writing this post is also a way for me to determine if I ever get any closer to finding an answer in future.