Issue 2: Vanishing

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

As we bid goodbye to the vanishing old year and greet the new January, there’s an unshakeable sense that things – places, people, ways of life – around us are disappearing at what seems like an ever-increasing rate, what with the chase for progress, development and incessant forward momentum.

After all, what is Singapore if not in a state of perpetual fading? It’s almost as if we’re all spiritually connected by a reset button commonly placed above us. There is, then, also the sense that with fading we are enacting transparency – how when something disappears it is at the same time made completely transparent, and that’s why we have honest writing, and honest art.

This issue was born out of the vanishing of the Golden Mile Complex, which led us to realize just how many other things around us are disappearing and vanishing every day, with new things erected almost immediately in their wake. In that sense, Singapore is an infinite palimpsest; and if you look closely at this issue’s features, things do vanish, but perhaps not without a trace.

Heraclitus teaches that no one ever steps in the same river twice – it’s not the same river and it’s not the same person. What do we have to bolster ourselves as we confront daily the realities of infinite vanishing and change in and around us, except art itself? And that’s what this issue is: a small, honest slice of “it was once here” – even if this all one day becomes “we were once here”.

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