Joella Kiu
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Johanna Palmeyro was a Community & Education resident for SAM Residencies Cycle 2 (1 August to 31 October 22) with her project Movimiento Justicia Museal (Museum Justice Movement), an artivist initiative driving conversations around how museums can be socially engaged and accessible spaces.
Gathering your thoughts about an encounter or an event is often a tricky affair because how much can your memory be trusted with remembering how things went? Some of these conversations happened in 2022, and things really only took off in 2023. It is mostly hazy and imprecise in my mind now, but perhaps there is some value still in embracing these fuzzy edges.
I begin with that caveat because it truly felt like happenstance that all of this even happened at all. I only managed to spend time with Johanna Palmeyro towards the end of her residency with the museum. Johanna runs Movimiento Justicia Museal, an artivist project that advocates for more inclusive and accessible museum spaces. During that time, we spoke a lot about her thoughts on public space in Singapore in comparison to public space in Argentina, and we also stalked geocaches together.
There’s a lovely explainer video on what geocaching is by the geocaching community themselves, but in short, I would describe it as a clandestine treasure hunt that takes place in public spaces. The activity has seen me crouching in corners, stalking staircases, and looking underneath rocks. It completely changes the way one approaches or sees a space. Instead of looking for the best way to get from one place to another, I find myself looking for the most mundane objects that have been hidden in plain sight.
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Around the same time, Johanna had organised a community-centred workshop during her time at the museum, and I remember asking what she’d do with the signboards that were made during the workshop since her residency was ending soon. They were beautiful, and I was hoping she wouldn’t throw them out.
That led us to thinking about how we could tap on the pre-existing infrastructure afforded by the geocaching community, app, and established etiquette to:
- Bring people to the museum,
- Show them a different side to Singapore, and
- Give away some signboards.
I have to admit I got waylaid midway through trying to get this off the ground. I definitely lost steam and dropped the ball on trying to make this happen. When I apologised to Johanna for how long things took, she just responded with “at our own rhythm always 💕”
We published a geocache in March 2023, and titled it “A Corridor with a View”. As much as I’d like to share pictures of it in-situ, it’ll give away its location to those who want to visit — so here are some photos of the cache in progress instead.
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And some screengrabs from the Geocaching app of recent logged finds.
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