Paper short abstract:

In Singapore, depression is experienced as a penumbra that cannot be accounted for. My ethnography approaches the postcolonial city politico-ethically, affectively, sensorially, multi-modally—through people, stories, images, gestures, artmaking, sensory textures, buildings-as-companions.

Paper long abstract:

In Singapore, depression is experienced as a penumbra that cannot be accounted for. Some queer artists evoke "mental illness" as both an engagement and departure from diagnostic categories. These artists, while living with the stigma of queerness and mental illness, build political coalitions out of the affective—and opaque—material of their lives. They engage in healing practices of artmaking that aren't necessarily biomedical in framing and in outcome. Artistic practices create a space for transgressive "worlding" (Stewart 2013) where expressions of urban marginality are allowed but under certain socio-legal regimes. To avoid hypervisibility and stigma, artists engage in a gesture of opacity and express this thought: I want to be seen but I also don't want to expose myself. Centrally, my paper focuses on people's arts of existence and addresses how urban marginality is ethically lived in the everyday. I examine artistic expressivities and practices as localized ways of contending with suffering that try to escape a medicalized framework variably. Art gestures towards affective states. Artmaking involves actions that have a promissory note of healing effect (Lévi-Strauss 1963; Hogan and Pink 2010). Furthermore, there is resonance between the spatial metaphor of marginalization and a focus on the city as such. My ethnography approaches the postcolonial city of Singapore politico-ethically, affectively, sensorially, multi-modally—through people, stories, images, sensory textures, atmospheres, buildings-as-companions. My paper spotlights how my interlocutors provide a model of ethical proximity with their environments in flux—by "speaking nearby" (Minh-ha and Chen 1992) their spatial and architectural forms.