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Tanglin Halt, an iconic HDB block, was printed on the back of the former one dollar note in Singapore and has been part of the visual memory of the public. The adjacent former Malayan Railways line that divides Tanglin Halt from One North rendered this area into a contact zone. Due to its ownership of the railway, Malaysia had partial sovereignty over the railway corridor through Singapore. Between 1903 and 2011, the Malayan Railways (official known as Keretapi Tanah Melayu Railway) had its second station at Tanglin Halt Industrial Estate. Apart from symbolising the economic and social ties between Malaysia and Singapore @, the railways were and still are embodiments of the reunions and farewells for those families separated by the Johor Straits after Singapore gained its independence in 1965.
Nowadays, the area is also a contact zone where living species and their lived experiences are in constant negotiation with two forces of aspiration—the government’s futuristic vision of Singapore as represented by their economic project to house international start-up companies (such as Google and Grab) in One North, and the escalating sense of nostalgia and solastalgia triggered by the government’s plans for the ‘en bloc’ redevelopment of Tanglin Halt. Apart from lamenting the erasure of cultural memory, a muted grievance towards economic injustice also reverberates when Tanglin Halt is brought up in conversation. This is because the redevelopment plan not only involves the enforced relocation of lower-income residents who have called Tanglin Halt their home since the 1960s but also projects a rezoning plan for luxury condominiums. On Tanglin Halt’s sonic terrain, there is no frontier in the developmental agenda’s erosion; however, there is also no space in Tanglin Halt that is exempt from reverberating bird songs and multi-species storytelling.
Tanglin Halt is the focus of the experimental short film, {if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows through Leaves (hereafter referred to as Like Shadows through Leaves) by The Migrant Ecologies Project, which premiered at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 2021. The cinematic language of Like Shadows through Leaves is encapsulated by its opening scene, featuring a multivalence of enunciations—Malay, Tamil, Hokkien, Teochew, and, most predominantly, a broad spectrum of bird sounds. The opening segment not only consists of voiceovers relaying dialects that introduce the physical situatedness of the project but also is layered with field recordings of bird songs that offer a sonic depth in its out-of-worldness. Together with the abstract scientific images captured by a microscope, the film introduces a cinematic experience that challenges the ocular-centric reception mode. In this cinematic space and time, memories of Tanglin Halt are ensounded through the relations between humans and birds. The recollections of residents’ everyday lives are narrated as part of a sociality that essentially centres around Tanglin Halt as a contact zone of contentions where feathered creatures, their homo sapiens neighbours, ecology activists, and bird poachers are all passionate about and situated in the place in different conflicting ways. In fact, the title “If your bait can sing the wild one will come” is a phrase derived from an interview with a former bird-trapper who is also featured in the film. Here, the contours of Tanglin Halt are emplaced by a nexus of passionate but contested engagements with avian and other more human worlds. There is also an intense intersection and deep ecological knowledge shared between birds, humans, and other non-human residents in the nearby forest, around the Tudigong’s (Lord of the Soil and the Ground) makeshift shrine, within the residential compound, and inside their houses.
In Like Shadows through Leaves, the Communities of both migratory birds and humans are featured as resident protagonists of Tanglin Halt. The positionality of the narrators/storytellers/voice performers is constantly shifting according to birds and the forms of remembrance. In other words, when the aural experience is not subjected to the eye, the memories of a listener are “intersubjectively constituted in perception, while producing the very thing [she/he] perceives”. [2] How to see what to see matters, especially when one bears in mind the economy of bird watching that engages an ocular-centric perception of birds. One may consider how much our visual memories of birds have to do with images “captured” by birdwatchers’ telephoto lenses – a predatory capitalist/colonial gaze. It is a form of image production that not only fetishises birds for visual consumption but also silences birds through oceans of high-resolution still images circulating in digital formats. With a keen awareness of the politics of visuality and a determination to move away from the visual rhetoric of “capture”, Like Shadows through Leaves is both the film title and its method of cinematic storytelling. Lucy Davis, a member of the Migrant Ecologies Project and the conceptualiser of the film, explains the shadow play in the film by referring to the following quote from Eduardo Cadava’s writing,
By casting shadows across itself, the surface of the earth, and the bodies or objects nearby, the tree works like a photographic apparatus and, in its collaboration with the light of the sun, recalls the earliest photographic experiments – not only those of William Henry Fox Talbot or Anna Atkins, whose “photogenic drawings” were among the first efforts to produce images without a camera, but also those of Aristotle himself. [3]
In Cadava’s alternative genealogy, moments of presence are constantly photographed by the ingenuity of nature. Unlike the way that the mechanical reproduction of the photographic arts encapsulates time, the collaborative results of the sun and the earth are shadows and shadowy images that do not compromise the openness of time. As time streams through thoughts like a river in one’s memory, shadows embody the flow of time for one’s eyes. By not including a photographic representation of birds in Like Shadows through Leaves, the viewers’ eyes are captivated by segments of stop-motion shadowplay and are animated by the shadowy contours of birds. While the video camera navigates through the eerily empty Tanglin Halt and the dense forest of the former Malayan Railways under the scorching sunlight, the asynchronicity between the visual and the aural of the film offers a dimensionality of socioeconomics with volumes of nostalgia and the reality of displacement in a time of developmentalism.
Like Shadows through Leaves presents Tanglin Halt as what Donna J. Haraway describes as a contact zone [4] where the co-becomingness of multispecies sociality is embodied in forms of entanglement. Through scenes of a Chinese uncle mimicking bird songs and segments of a South Asian auntie [5] vividly introducing herself as Parrot Mother, the nuance of entanglement stands for a dynamic of the ecological assemblage that is experienced in an aural mode of remembrance. When the presence of reenactments signifies the passing, it also constitutes a collective refusal of oblivion by residing in its new habitat in those listening bodies. As Tim Ingold states, “Of the body, as it sings, hums, whistles or speaks, that it is ensounded.” Whether birds or humans, whether on screen or off screen, bodies cholate, feel, and breathe when sound is transmitted through the air. All are entangled through the sensation of listening while being listened to. In the cinematic time and space of Like Shadows through Leaves, Tanglin Halt is no longer a static symbol of the past on a one-dollar note but is a vibrant assemblage of lived and living beings that enchants new encounters for the future.
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