Dust Suspended in the Attic

Through collaged images from personal family albums and rephotographing old addresses, this project experiments with contextualising the presence of the photographic image in Eurasian and Peranakan descent, two minority groups in Singapore.

Whilst relocating homes during the pandemic lockdown, I uncovered numerous boxes of family archive images. Familiar and unfamiliar faces stared back at me from the albums, often echoing my own. Letters tucked in between pages, marks made behind images and official documents; drew a window into the lives that came before us - I decided to investigate them. The beginnings of this project organically manifested as a metaphorical departure to understanding the migratory roots of my Dutch maternal ‘Nan’ through her maritime merchant ancestors, and those of my Peranakan paternal ‘Ah Ma’ and her straits-born Chinese heritage. As the granddaughter of two multi-cultural ethnicities, it acts as both a geographical study and inquiry into ancestry and the migratory landscape.

Through collaged images from personal albums, this project experiments with contextualising the presence of the photographic image in Eurasian and Peranakan life in Singapore during the 20th century. Revealing the typically diverse ways a family has grappled with this visual medium in expressing identity, traditions and nationality. Adjacently, with multiple family members suffering from Alzheimers, the project aims to unravel fragmented connections between present and past. By drawing connections to our hybrid culture today and rephotographing the addresses left behind in official documents where my relatives may have lived - I hope to stumble into a hole in time, through which I might enter another’s history; and ponder the continuity or discontinuity of memory in different times.