October 27, 2020

The Singapore River Festival was held from 2 August to 15 September 2019 at various riverside venues in Singapore. Some of the festival highlights included the Riverfront Spectacular in Clarke Quay Central, which showcased talented local music and circus acts, and the LAH Bazaar which is an outdoor market concept selling food and beverage.

The Singapore River Festival can be termed an ‘eventscape’, an event held with the intent to transform the waterfront venues in Singapore to match the imaginary of the state. This imaginary, coined as ‘New-Asia-Singapore’, is one that fuses modern Asian dynamism with tradition and heritage. In the article ‘Recreating place, replacing memory: Creative destruction at the Singapore River’ (Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 2005), Associate Professors Chang Tou Chuang and Shirlena Huang (both from NUS Geography) also introduced the concept of ‘builtscapes’ and ‘artscapes’, which are ways the built environment and display of public art transform the waterfront site of the Singapore River to match the imaginary of the state. Together, ‘eventscapes’, ‘builtscapes’, and ‘artscapes’ have concurrently concealed certain activities, people, and places, while celebrating and memorializing others. For instance, the statue of Sir Stamford Raffles at Empress Place was built to recognize Singapore’s colonial past, yet the original inhabitants of Singapore, the Orang Laut, are not represented at the waterfront through in any form. Instead, they are forgotten. There is more to a landscape than meets the eye, and the reason why the Singapore River scene was built and exhibited this particular way may have been a conscious attempt by the state to reproduce and reconstruct certain imaginaries of Singapore that appeal.

Read the article here.