After Death

Diong Fuhan

In ancient Egypt, funeral practices and burial customs were based on the belief in the rebirth after death. By preserving the physical form of the body through mummification, the dead is immortalised and prepared for an afterlife.

1 Before the Old Kingdom, bodies were laid in desert pits and preserved naturally through dessication. The wealthier Ancient Egyptians laid their bodies in stone tombs. This led to the construction of the burial monument, The Great Pyramid of Giza, for an Egyptian Pharoah.2

During the Ming Dynasty, the people believed in the existence of an afterlife, so the rulers sought to build massive tombs for themselves. Over a period of 200 years, tombs were built at the foot of hills and protected by walls totalling 40 kilometres. These tombs cover an area of more than 40 square kilometres, northwest of Beijing, the capital city of China.3

These ancient societies were built upon totalitarian values.

More than 4000 years after the completion of the Great Pyramids of Giza and 400 years after the fall of the Ming Dynasty, how different are our policies regarding the remembrance of the dead

1 http://www.crystalinks.com/egyptafterlife.html and landscapes of death in Singapore?

1) Cemeteries in and around the valuable city area were exhumed. A stateowned public cemetery at Choa Chu Kang was offered as an alternative to deal with the disposal of the dead.

2) A 15 year leasehold on burial plots in Choa Chu Kang Cemetery is imposed. All graves are to be exhumed in 15 years. If one was not bounded by religious reasons, the remains will be cremated. A grid pattern is now imposed onto this state-owned cemetery to facilitate burial and exhumation.

3) Cremation is advocated. It is the preferred way of dealing with the disposal of bodies.

4) Besides temporary burial and cremation where you place cremated remains in an urn, you could also opt for the scattering of ashes into the sea, 2.8km South of Pulau Semakau, a landfill site.4

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramids

3 http://www.crystalinks.com/chinartifacts.html

4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Singapore

Probes into the Values of the Coast

Kenneth Koh Qibao

The coast has to be read in its multifariousness: as cultural object or commodity; as territory or political field; as a geographical feature; as an outline around a landmass; as a demarcation between ground and sea; as a figureground relationship; as a fractal edge; as a place where boats harbour and dreams ebb into the frothing waves.

Peering from the full-height glass railings of the Marina Bay Sands’ iconic Skypark, the first thing that strikes me is how immaculately framed this particular view is. It was apparent that the immense cantilevered platform was designed to present this interface between land and water as Singapore’s glowing scoreboard of triumphs and successes-to-come. The apparatus responsible for this massive moving of the landscape – scaffolding, machinery – all proudly assembled and displayed. This scenario somehow recalls artist Shen Shaomin’s bonsai installations: plants shackled and bolted with torturous devices designed to wrench the woody stems into beautiful forms, the metal clamps and screws equally compelling.

In Berita Singapura: A New Look at Housing, a propagandistic film produced in 1967, the many scenes of HDB flats are interrupted with images of a coastline of dense vegetation fringed with a wide band of virgin soil that expands into the sea. This is the result of land reclamation at

Changi and the East Coast where strips of new virgin ground were created, and later, transformed into new housing estates like Marine Parade. In the process of reclamation, “one thousand acres of land are reclaimed”, forming an appendage that stretches half a mile out to sea”, as narrated in the film. The earth comes from the Changi Hills, transplanted and formed into the homogeneous rectangle of land displayed in the film.

As I furiously flip the pages of my street directory printed less than a year ago, I realize that the three roundabouts that were supposed to be along the road are now gone, along with the many colonial-era bungalows that used to dot the landscape of coastal Seletar. The roads are now straightened and the hilly terrain leveled to make way for the new Aerospace Hub envisioned by Singapore’s planning authorities. A peek at online forums would reveal the collective lament of these changes by the people who once lived here - it is these fragments or unclaimed shards of the city that go unnoticed, and are silently rendered obsolete by the mappings of change.

While I do not personally feel any attachment to the changing coast and its artifacts, it is slightly inconvenient to keep purchasing new maps.