Re-orientating the orientated


The playground roundabout came to a pause, you get off the roundabout, ending up diagonally

An exercise in thinking through centres, nodes, intersections. Let’s ask these questions of orientations, wherein phenomenology is also questioned. Can we but all re-think the didactics of phenomenology and its relevance within a region once controlled. How do we re-think decoloniality and re-speculate futures?

How can we decolonise experienced bodies?

It is 2055, the year where an openly queer politician is elected into parliament. People question the legitimacy of an umbrella term such as queer. Suggestions include using other forms of language as a re-orientation, and with animistic and ritualistic belief systems replacing theoretical, activist framing. An exercise in nostalgia takes over the current, and revises the current instead of the historical space it used to occupy.

The gantry lights up with the flick of the wrist. Camera pans to the back of the protagonist, a non-conforming body gestures to the incoming train. On the screen, a clock strikes 13 on a 36 hour clock. Train doors open and bodies navigate the space, passing through one another in a world where quantum tunnelling occurs as a result of a pandemic.

Southeast Asia is now a powerful economy. With some countries spearheading this turn while Singapore takes on an ambiguous position. As they always do. Countries have invested in this space of ambiguity where resonance taxes are safe.



Can we ever really re-orientate the orientated?

The roundabout sits alone in the quiet playground, willing itself to be turned.