Singapore - Insula
2021-ongoing
'I could not forbear getting up to the top of a little mountain, and looking out to sea, in hopes of seeing a ship: then fancy that, at a vast distance, I spied a sail, please myself with the hopes of it, and, after looking steadily, till I was almost blind, lose it quite, and sit down and weep like a child, and thus increase my misery by my folly.'
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Singapore is an island of 733 square kilometres. You can drive its perimeter in an afternoon. During the years of Covid-19 travel restrictions, that perimeter, the coast, the sea wall, the water's edge, became the furthest point a resident could go. Not far, by any measure. Far enough to feel the difference.
Insula is a record of those edges. Over two years I photographed Singapore's coastline, its working harbours and recreational beaches, its sea walls and mangrove margins, its eastern shores and western straits — not as landscape but as limit. These are photographs of the places people came to stand when they needed to look at something beyond the island's borders, even if looking was all they could do.
The horizon in these images is not picturesque. It is a border. The ships visible from shore, and Singapore's waters are among the busiest in the world, the anchorage perpetually crowded, were moving freely while the people watching them were not. That inversion, visible but never stated in the images, is Insula's central tension: a port city that could not leave, watching the world continue to move without it.
Defoe's Crusoe does not simply observe the sea. He projects onto it. He half-invents the sail he needs to see, sustains the belief just long enough to let hope become grief, then begins again. There is nothing irrational in this. It is what people do when the horizon is the only direction left open. Insula is a record of that posture, the body turned outward, toward water, during the years when water was a wall.
