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Accepted Paper:
Ethnographic Canvases: Unveiling Multimodal Promises in Singaporean Art Therapeutics
Alexandra Diana Hanae Sastrawati
(Princeton University)
A transformative shift in care ethics emerges in Singapore's mental health and creative arts fields. My paired image-text canvases converse with my artmaking interlocutors, using multimodality to explore perceptual collaboration, as a way to be in relation-with them.
Paper long abstract:
A sea change in the ethics of care is coming into view in the Singaporean mental health and creative arts sectors. My ethnography examines the therapeutic roles the arts play for marginalized populations in post-pandemic Singapore. It focuses on the predicaments of queer folx who participate in the formal art world and migrant construction workers living in precariousness and participating in art workshops. Centering the creative expression that emerges from two kinds of urban precarity—that of queer folx and that of migrant workers—I regard the efficacy (making do by making art) and shared stakes (being set outside full citizenship creates the conditions for mental distress) as starting ground for my research. Studying queer and migrant worlds through the shared aperture of artmaking opens space for anthropology to consider how different kinds of political marginality might be collectively redressed and recast as generative of new aesthetics, politics, ethics and cultural forms. From fieldwork encounters and archivings to composing lyrical photo essays, I find my interlocutors’ artmaking practices to be open-ended: a testimony of suffering; aspiration; sense of relief; workaround; an expressive form that may resonate with healing. My canvases, pairings of images and text, speak with and “nearby” (Minh-ha in Chen 1992: 87) my interlocutors and their creative expression. Multimodality allows me to explore the space-time of perceptual collaboration with my fellow artmakers, as a way to be in relation-with them. This witnessing beyond the ethnographic gaze (Welcome and Thomas 2021) is where I see the promise of multimodality.