The allotment garden occupies a linear pedestrian walkway stretching from Geylang Road opposite to Wisma Geylang Serai all the way to East Coast road next to Katong, and is currently assigned “Haig Walk” by NParks in Singapore. There are a total of thirty-one garden allotments. I first stumbled upon the allotment gardens when I was led on by one of its gardeners I observed, who was towing a pack of soil from the nearby market to the garden-site. Upon chatting with the resident-gardeners, I learned that the park connector was actually the long guiding storm drain I used to take on foot while walking back home from the former Singapore National Stadium. It has now been cemented from 2009 to accommodate the new connector.
What stands out for me the most about the allotment gardens is the prevalence of local aesthetics marked by its own cultural patterns that is unique to the local community of resident-gardeners. While Haig road’s public housing estate is one of the oldest in Singapore built in 1976, today the neighbourhood boosts a diverse group of residents whose demographic not only includes native Malays, Indians and Chinese, but also new citizens and economic immigrants from the West and rest of Asia. Therefore the site is significant of rapid gentrification and is symbolically marked by the presence of a lone attap house whose existence is overshadowed by new apartments surrounding it. This observation underscores the ambiguous relationship between people and land in the urban landscape. In this way, the garden-site has symbolically resisted against the unheeding-cold-vapid urbanizing way of life, has become the backdrop for a coming project with the resident-gardeners where we were engaged in moments of shared-labour and exchange.
Lone attap house along park connector, 2021
Allotment gardens, 2021
After months spent assisting the resident-gardeners on-site, I began to develop an insight into some of the challenges they faced in recent years; one of them has to be losing freehold of the sovereign garden site in 2017, where the land was expropriated by the state. As a consequence, each garden allotment is assigned to a new number plate; and the need to follow a guideline in maintaining the gardens to a standard operating procedure, puts an existing gardener at stake for risk of losing their garden plot. Under the new mandate, there were also talks for the gardeners to migrate their allotment gardens to another site in th neighbourhood, but however, was impeded by the apprehensions as shown by some of the senior gardeners. Taking this as a premise for intervention, I came up with the idea of creating a collective garden with the gardeners on an empty grass patch designated between allotments 6 and 7. The empty garden lot has been identified by the Town Council to erect a plaquette and annexed the whole of the gardens as “Haig Walk.” But due to the lack of general consensus, the program was also delayed. The main structure of our collective garden was built in consultation with the lead-gardeners and was assembled by a retired carpenter. Each gardener will contribute a crop from their own garden plot. One of the pioneering gardeners opined that the collective garden could act as a legend to the actual garden site––a scaled-down version of the live-allotment gardens arranged in sequence mirroring the rundown of the allotments onto each planter box. I suggested to include a moving image (video) with a QR code on each planter box, to allow the public to scan and preview the materials in-situ. This would give the passers-by a glimpse of the gardeners who have kept the park connector beautiful with their allotment gardens.
Local produce from the allotment gardens, 2021
Collective planter boxes assemblage at the PA town centre, 2021
What is now clear is that the project is a speculative work about what will happen to the garden when the Town Council has to replace the collective garden with a plaquette on site––how will our communal relationships intervene, or influence the process?
Installation view: wooden planter sculptures, ink-jet portraits by Ivanho Harlim, handmade artist book & postcards, single-channel video installation on TV panel, colour & sound, 2021
Special thanks: Wang Ruobing, Hilmi Johandi, Ivanho Harlim & Shysilia Novita
© 2022
