Dynamic Natural Activity

Dynamic Natural Activity (U5)

The juxtapositions between volcanoes and city scenes, the similarities drawn between the volcanoes in Indonesia and the rising skyscrapers and the air-conditioned malls of Singapore are not coincidental or purely formal in nature. Volcanoes exist as markers of the earth’s fault-lines. And this film suggests at once an apparent fault-line between Indonesia and Singapore, but also through its sheer movement and flows suggests also a co-implication and relationship that is connected by way of the volcanoes. The ability to build a city, and a city as perhaps as spectacular as it is problematic like Singapore, requires a number of significant processes - one of which is undoubtedly the excavation of materials or minerals from volcanic eruptions. Here, in the case of the volcanoes in Indonesia, this would be largely the extraction of sulphur which then gets channeled through to several manufacturing processes - e.g. cosmetics, fertilisers, petroleum processing, insecticides. In other words, what this film does is to suggest a deeper time in thinking about the underlying processes that enables a consumerist city like Singapore to function, before we talk about urban policies or the infrastructure of a city, and to propose the eruption of the volcano into our imagination of Singapore. Could we then tentatively describe this film as a proposal towards a geological imagination of a city like Singapore? The future of cities like Singapore does not merely reside in the constructions of new housing projects or new traffic infrastructures that would move the people and information around more smoothly. Those are of immediate concern of course, but to take a deeper time, it might be the volcanoes of our neighbours that we should be looking at. That’s the scale of time that, I think, is evoked in the film, when we think about the longer takes of the volcanoes against the fast, frantic montages of Singapore’s cityscapes. The much longer history of the volcanoes vis-a-vis the shorter histories of cities. And then underneath it all, it seems, lava continues to flow. Lava, as ejecta, reminds us that the earth is constantly moving; it sweats, it bleeds, it shits. But I am also interested in the nature of lava once it spills out onto the surface of the earth because that troubles any linear understanding of time. So the usual linear reading of the earth’s history through its geological strata is troubled by this eruption. So perhaps this better explains why it was important to have the video looped. But I think I should stop here, because it is clear that the raw affect that flows through me when I first watched the film, is now, like the lava, been cooled and is fast solidifying into closed interpretations that could be counterintuitive to the work of U5. And because I can’t wait to have a glass of Dengue Sling. Thank you.