Located in an old neighbourhood, A Mallet & A Ball is a project situated in the residential town of Bishan in central Singapore. When I was asked to participate in a fieldwork in the neighbourhood, I visited numerous sites before arriving at the boundary of Bishan North near Marymount (next town). It was here that I encountered a community of Woodball players who are also the founder and keepers of the open field. The members are passionate about their Woodball site created and configured for Woodball and part leisure gardening. They personify the field with decorations of their own belongings keeping them naturalistic in view with a vernacular approach that is still evolving today. I got myself involved with the community as I am enticed by their self-organised endeavour as a viable form of community of practice that is led by people from the ground up. This way of self-governing is symptomatic of the saga behind Singapore Sports Hub since its opening in 2014. Having been caught up in a string of ongoing controversies between misaligned goals and actually making it accessible for the general public, the Singapore Sports Hub is finally closed in 2020 with the dissolution of the public-private consortium that has been running it since the opening. It was also ahead of the 2020 Singaporean general election where a part of Bishan was subsumed into the newly carved Marymount SMC and the Woodball community had to transit from Bishan North to Marymount, making minor changes, adapting to the new constituency.
I came up with the idea of asking the members to teach me how to play Woodball, which is rooted in the context of the locality. Then, I began painting en plein air on-site in the local community. Soon my work has evolved into a collective exhibitionary practice whose members of the community took on a performative role in recounting and sharing their early endeavours in playing Woodball in the public spaces during the 90s in Singapore. They have also accepted my invitation to design a 6-fairway Woodball course for another site. Taken as a whole, this interactivity can be understood as a discursive exhibition making process for a coming audience who will learn about the history of Woodball in Singapore led by the local community––how they have spent the past fifteen years negotiating space and moving sites before arriving at their current location in Bishan North, now Marymount where they call home.
Film excerpts, 2020
Special thanks: Wang Ruobing, Hilmi Johandi, Clare Veal.
© 2022
