soft/WALL/studs

Rapid Response Fellow
2020 – 2020

soft/WALL/studs is a collaborative project in Singapore involving several artists, writers, film makers, art workers, and researchers. Its projects include exhibitions, acts of amplification, hosting, fugitivity, counter-rhythm generation, support, resource gathering, research, writing, detournement, game-making, teaching, collaboration, and maintenance.

Organising team:
Kin Chui (soft/WALL/studs), he/him
ila, she/her
Kamiliah Bahdar (soft/WALL/studs), she/her
Marcus Yee (soft/WALL/studs), he/him
Johann Yamin (soft/WALL/studs), he/him
Div (soft/WALL/studs), they/them

Collaborators: 

Rikey Tenn Bun Ki 鄭文琦 (No Man’s Land, Nusantara Archive Project), he/him
Esther Lu 呂岱如, she/her
Lo Shih Tung 羅仕東, he/him
Sheryl Cheung 張欣, she/her
Ting Chaong Wen 丁昶文, he/him
Okui Lala, she/her
Irwan Ahmett, he/him, and Tita Salina, she/her
Tan Zi Hao, he/him
Syaheedah Iskandar, she/her
Nurul Huda Rashid (Bras Basah Open), she/her
Siddharta Perez, she/they
Norah Lea, she/her
Luca Lum (soft/WALL/studs), she/her
Shawn Chua (soft/WALL/studs, Bras Basah Open), he/him

Rapid Response Project

The collective soft/WALL/studs proposes a critical examination of the Southeast Asian regional construct of Nusantara, which translates from Old Javanese to “other islands”, and is a contested historical term that has resurfaced in relation to recent conversations about decolonisation and the Malay archipelago. Phase 1 includes a series of online programs bringing together twenty cultural workers from Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan to build affinities through exercises that involve the sharing of cuisines, languages, gestures, folk medicine, games, and histories. “Pulau Something” seeks to cultivate sustained futures of cross-border solidarity and decolonial affinities between cultural workers within and beyond the Malay archipelago. With the region’s history of colonial division and its present contexts of intensified ethnonationalism, xenophobia, and right-wing nativism, finding ways to cultivate regional solidarities is an urgent need.