In this chapter, I reflect on the politics of Singapore’s Garden City homescape in light of recently announced ambitions in 2020 to become a City in Nature. Drawing from Jack Halberstam’s ideas on wildness, I argue that Singaporeans need to reconsider the terms of our cohabitation with the more-than-human, beginning with an acknowledgement of eco-arrogance that characterises relationships between forests and human homemaking in Singapore. Inspired by Vanessa Watts’ Indigenous place-thought (2013), I reflect on the loss of The Substation’s Malayan Banyan tree in Singapore, which features prominently in artists’ memories of this home for the arts. I attend to the fictions of home, thinking through homesickness and nostalgia to articulate a loss that has not yet been recognised as a loss. In collaboration with young people from low-income families who have had precarious lived experiences of home, I will articulate a more nuanced relationship between human homemaking and forest conservation in Singapore. Through a series of workshops called Confiding in Trees designed to encourage more attentive listening to the more-than-human homescape, we learn to observe the landscape with trees; I suggest this as a way of becoming-homescape.

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Confiding in Trees: From Garden City Eco-arrogance to Cohabiting with Wildness

  • Adelina Ong

摘要

In this chapter, I reflect on the politics of Singapore’s Garden City homescape in light of recently announced ambitions in 2020 to become a City in Nature. Drawing from Jack Halberstam’s ideas on wildness, I argue that Singaporeans need to reconsider the terms of our cohabitation with the more-than-human, beginning with an acknowledgement of eco-arrogance that characterises relationships between forests and human homemaking in Singapore. Inspired by Vanessa Watts’ Indigenous place-thought (2013), I reflect on the loss of The Substation’s Malayan Banyan tree in Singapore, which features prominently in artists’ memories of this home for the arts. I attend to the fictions of home, thinking through homesickness and nostalgia to articulate a loss that has not yet been recognised as a loss. In collaboration with young people from low-income families who have had precarious lived experiences of home, I will articulate a more nuanced relationship between human homemaking and forest conservation in Singapore. Through a series of workshops called Confiding in Trees designed to encourage more attentive listening to the more-than-human homescape, we learn to observe the landscape with trees; I suggest this as a way of becoming-homescape.