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Canteen Brick-Down

By Debbie Loo on March 14, 2008

The Site is never a blank canvas – it is always already a palimpsest of narratives and forces. This video installation elucidates a particular narrative in the site of the NUS Arts Canteen – of dislocated forces between its present and past. This area of dislocation resides between the layers of the intimate red-brick columns of the old Canteen and the white grandiose structure that now stands. By mapping the past onto the present through the manipulation of the conventional architectural Plan, this video creates a ‘back-talking’ amidst the structural coordinates of the old and new, when both collide in real time, in this work. The process of physically marking out these various coordinates becomes a performance of an architectural plotting of the old brick columns with life elements. One is drawn along with the moving brick column on its quest of re-locating its position within the Site. A disjuncture in logic and expectations starts to surface when the dislocation between the boundaries of time and space are made apparent by the physical manifestation of the brick column in a site that has been completely obliterated.

Did it stand at the spot beside the guy eating his lunch? Or behind a food stall where the vendor is now standing? The different durations of activities in real time and the static fact of the old brick columns which are being plotted out in the video destabilizes ones’ experience of the space – planting questions of what once stood there.

While we, as a society persist forward and negotiate a physical and psychical landscape of constant dislocation, this installation reveals the unmarked truths of Site and its narratives, bringing to the foreground, latent past forces which resist dematerialization.

Debbie is a student of architecture, a lover of poetry, and a hopeful song-writer who longs for solo-travels and tends to dip her fingers in too many honey-pots.