Affective paragrounds: alternative envisionings through multidisciplinary contemporary arts in Singapore

Abstract

ABSTRACT The socio-political transformations of East and Southeast Asia, their direct impact on the changing norms of censorship, cultural and urban policies, and on growing surveillance have led people involved with the socially engaged artistic and creative practices to develop varied tactics and strategies to renegotiate the (im)material boundaries set for them. These mainly discursive, spatial, temporal and aesthetic forms of affective civic engagement aim to disseminate alternative envisionings without necessarily having a directly antagonistic agenda towards the establishment. Inspired by the recent discourses of affect and its potentiality not only in arts but more broadly in temporary, human/nonhuman encounters, and also in the urban environment, I propose that this kind of liminal and fluid self-positioning between ‘underground(s)’ and mainstream could be better understood as ‘affective paragrounds’. As an organic and continuously reconfiguring rhizomatic translocal network of protagonists – and their (in)tangible spaces – affective paragrounds are premised on mixed-method temporary approaches and alliances of communal collaborations with continuously changing positions, roles and strategies. By paragrounding themselves in ‘in-between-ness’ of private and public, they function on the borderline of (in)visibility to re-envision gradual transformations of socio-political and cultural conditions, at the same time raising awareness of freedom of expression, participatory citizenship and civil society formation.