About the work
The Singapore River can be thought of as a kind of “psychogeographical faultline” - a site constantly in construction and motion, where the spaces of our memories and dreams interact, merge, or drift apart - like a series of tectonic plates. The river is a site of significant historical, economic, and social importance - yet despite its centrality, it seems that not all Singaporeans know its history, its exact location or even its appearance.
It is known that national mapping organisations around the world insert deliberate errors in their base maps as “fingerprints”, which are subsequently used to detect the infringement of copyright of these maps. In 2007, in the case of Virtual Map (Singapore) Pte Ltd v Singapore Land Authority, the government statutory board, Singapore Land Authority sued the online web mapping service Virtual Map for copying their maps. SLA also admitted the addition of several fake features on their maps, including a fake deadend, fake temple and a rather idiosyncratic drawing of Fort Gate. It was argued that these fake features were not meant to mislead regular users of the map, but that they existed so as to allow the map’s author to identify the map as their own work.
"Here the River Lies" is an interactive map installation of the Singapore River that requires the participation of the audience to complete the work. The audience is invited to contribute their stories and memories of the Singapore River to a large hand-drawn map of the Singapore River, regardless of whether the memories are real, partially real, or imaginary. All of the stories are documented on its online archive, without distinction between which are real or fictional stories. The map thus becomes each visitor’s very own, as they would be the only person who would be able to recognise whether their memory was real or a confabulation.
This work has been previously exhibited at The Substation (2010), Galerie Steph (2013), Singapore Art Museum (2014) and Maison Salvan (2015; Toulouse, France). The work has been specially adapted for this space.
Read more about the work
here.