Aesthetic Screening (2017-ongoing)
110 digital photographs
110 digital photographs
Aesthetic Screening takes its title from the administrative language articulated around bin centers in Singapore. Highly overlooked as architectural structures, bin centers are often framed as a necessary inconvenience to nearby residents, and they are therefore designed to be unnoticed, or as one document describes it, 'aesthetically screened'. Bin centers serve as work sites for the migrant workers hired to clean public housing estates; but for a significant proportion of estate cleaners, the centers also serve as places for their resting, cooking, eating and laundry, before returning back to their (often crowded) dormitories or apartments.
The work responds to the legal and financial precariousness of migrant workers at large, but also contends with the ethics and politics of photographic inclusion. As any unsanctioned participation in photographs in and of a work site poses a potential risk, the images are deliberately quiet about the locational contexts of these centers, and refrain from featuring any identifiable human figures. They are also made during the night when their labour is most invisible and when the bin centers are least recognizable. It also questions the nature of dignified modes of living, and perhaps what can be done to design just spaces for workers who make up almost one-fifth of Singapore's total population. Finally, it foregrounds the bin centre as a reminder of the jarring worlds that separate migrant workers and the residents they serve, made more acute by their ridiculously close proximity.
The work responds to the legal and financial precariousness of migrant workers at large, but also contends with the ethics and politics of photographic inclusion. As any unsanctioned participation in photographs in and of a work site poses a potential risk, the images are deliberately quiet about the locational contexts of these centers, and refrain from featuring any identifiable human figures. They are also made during the night when their labour is most invisible and when the bin centers are least recognizable. It also questions the nature of dignified modes of living, and perhaps what can be done to design just spaces for workers who make up almost one-fifth of Singapore's total population. Finally, it foregrounds the bin centre as a reminder of the jarring worlds that separate migrant workers and the residents they serve, made more acute by their ridiculously close proximity.