WORKAROUND:
Alternative Sites of Labour

Studio Tutor
A/P Dr. Lilian Chee

Type
Elective Module, Studio-Seminar

  • Japan’s geographical location makes it particularly vulnerable to natural disasters. The impact of a disaster is often measured at an urban scale, and lives are reduced to mere statistics. Adopting Kon Wajiro’s Modernology, or the “science of everyday observation”1, as a research methodology for exploring the impacts of a disaster on a human scale, this essay offers an anthropological view of disaster management and relief that goes beyond urban planning parameters of infrastructure. Through observation and inquiry into Japanese culture and the everyday life of the Japanese people, specifically, looking into the material culture of the home, temporary evacuation shelters, and personal emergency bags, this essay reveals how disaster relief in Japan is woven into the everyday and the mundane. This essay posits that disasters can bring local communities and businesses together to give rise to alternative forms of labour and seeks to uncover how disasters shape our perspective of work and the home, where the constituents of a home are pared down in the face of a disaster.

Student
Lau Kah Hui Sarah

Academic Year
2022/2023, Semester 2

  • Leaky Bodies is a medical ethnographic film made for my thesis titled Please Give Gong Gong A Call. The film is part of my visual studies into Lewy Body Dementia (LBD), using my grandfather’s home as a medium to describe his medical condition and his caregiver’s modifications to the home through intuitive design hacks. This essay unpacks the film’s methodology in highlighting the paucity of spaces of care within Singaporean public housing, and the gaps between existing medical literature and the qualitative embodied experience of LBD.

    The essay adopts a non-conventional structure with two formats of texts meant to be read in conjunction with one another. One outlines the filmic techniques employed to reconcile the neurotypical mundane caregiving with neurodivergent ways of embodying space through the lens of the LBD subject. The other stories the flat through excerpts of used objects as they describe spaces of care through rituals of bodily maintenance. The film and essay sets out to question whether existing modes and infrastructures of care in public housing are adequate in enabling non-normative bodies to live dignified lives and continue to be cared for without excessive burden.

Student
Lim Kun Yi James

Academic Year
2022/2023, Semester 2

  • Having run a full remote 14-pax software-development startup for over a year, I have textual documentation of the successes, struggles, conflicts, and interactions between work, social, and everyday life. This paper reveals the changing sociomaterial norms between remote workers requiring computer systems and the idea of domesticity/home, brought about by remote or hybrid work models. These work models increase reliance on and adoption of digital conferencing software, portable hardware, and flexi workspaces. Remote workers cite increased flexibility, productivity, improved mental health and well-being, prompting the potential for a re-evaluation of work culture. The paper aims to explore the correlations between remote work culture, and workers' mental health. The paper analyzes interpersonal relationships between remote colleagues and familial members, to understand the agency of home workspaces and how daily life is affected by it.

Student
Tham Weng Yew

Academic Year
2022/2023, Semester 2

  • Incomplete landscapes presents a body of work that studies the act of coproduction in architecture. This film is a reimagination of Pedra Branca through a fictional narrative where the methodology of coproduction has been used to transform the island into an incomplete landscape. Working through multiple scales and with a variety of non-human actants, the film explores the use of materiality, time, and sound to craft a spatial experience where coproductive forces are used to shape the island. Here the island’s transformation is explored further through human made (programmatic changes) and non-human forces (nature and time).

Student
Tan Wei Jie, Eugene

Academic Year
2022/2023, Semester 2

  • “Pictured above in figure 1 is a small arrangement of furniture that is set up during mealtimes in the home of Lois, an elderly lady. Lois suffers from Parkinson’s Disease, which is a brain disorder which leads to “difficulty with walking, balance, and coordination.”1 As such, Lois lives with two caregivers who take care of her daily: Eunice, her adult daughter, and Mia, a live-in foreign domestic worker. Lois’ strength and coordination waxes and wanes throughout the day, thus needing someone to be by her side for assistance almost constantly. Returning to figure 1, we can see that a wooden chair has been made a part of this daily set- up for mealtimes. This chair marks out space for Mia or Eunice; from here they may observe, anticipate, and appropriately intervene when Lois needs the help. This is because Lois’ ability may falter at any moment and she will be no longer be able feed herself, requiring the prompt response of her caregivers.”

Student
John Chew Geronimo Jr

Academic Year
2021/2022, Semester 2

  • The film, Everything, Everywhere, All at once (2022), is a family drama. It tells of a first-generation Asian immigrant Mother in America who juggles

    a struggling laundromat business, diverse familial roles of a mother, wife, and daughter, in the midst of racial discrimination and rapidly evolving and confusing times. This mental act of juggling expectations and responsibilities is tiresome; Being needed by everyone, everywhere, and all the time. This whirlwind of attention sets the stage for the drama which develops as the film progresses. It narrates a mother’s love for her child, going through multiple dimensions, fighting with all her might to save her daughter from the cusp of self-destructive nihilism.

    This documentation exercise and essay hopes to represent a similar condition but observed in a home-schooling family-of-seven (eight including the help- er). Minus the dramatism and inter-dimensional hopping, the nature of this condition is overwhelming and omnipresent within the confines of the home, but it is made manageable due to a profound love and recognition of the po- tentiality of children.

    The documentation contains a selection of photographs and drawings, and a toy. The representations progress from realistic depictions to more abstract semantic labelling, before codifying and representing the domestic labour con- dition through a toy. Interfacing and playing with the representational object should produce an understanding of the case-study household that is difficult to capture through images alone.

Student
Ng Lee Han Joshua

Academic Year
2021/2022, Semester 2