Across the Southeast Asian region, no city is immune to the material realities and specificities of their shared tropical condition. Concrete slabs break from turgor pressure within the resilient root networks that run beneath our feet. Steel and iron bars transmutate in a fiery display of alchemy once in contact with the air, thick with humidity. Seemingly smooth, unbreachable walls reveal the innate porosity of ‘man-made’ environments when algae and mildew begin to blossom on rain-streaked surfaces. These are creeping symptoms of an urban landscape that is more vibrantly populated with other agents than most ‘modern’ individuals would care to admit. 

Rather than view these phenomena as flaws to be rectified, or worse, an invasion into human territory, what is to be gained if these are seen as a co-production of acts by various cohabiting agents of equal standing within the same system? Can creating space for non-human beings simultaneously uplift the rights of the people to shape the future in a world increasingly dominated by an oligopoly of State powers and corporations?

‘Tropicalia Vulgaris’, a collaboration between architectural designers Kai McLaughlin and Annabelle Tan of Studio Mess and photographer Finbarr Fallon, is a radical speculation on the types of alternative infrastructure necessary for tropical futures to face up to the looming climate crisis at hand. Three large sculptural works – part architectural model, part abstract plaything – form the centrepiece of the installation, poignantly backgrounded by immersive photographs that reveal galvanising moments where the smooth, stoic surface of Singapore’s immaculate infrastructure is breached. Exhibited as part of ‘Another World is Possible’ at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore which spotlighted bold and optimistic visions of the future, the installation poses a simple question – what do the infrastructural systems of tomorrow look like and who (or what) has the privilege of inhabiting them?

In developmentalist states across the globe, infrastructural projects, from colonial to postcolonial eras, continue to rest on a set of largely unchallenged assumptions, privileging imperial visions, grand territorial ambitions and a mastery of nature. Infrastructure, beyond a mere material conduit that connects people and places, is the medium through which paradoxical and intensely political feelings of progress, competition, domination and violence are circulated. 

Brian Larkin describes this as the “unbearable modernity of infrastructure”, which is both captured in its technical capacity that serves the organization of a market economy and globalized trade but also through infrastructure’s deep affectual commitments, especially in developing societies. He argues that, beguiled by a sense of desire and awe, many infrastructural projects are merely duplicates across the globe, enabling such countries to partake in a “contemporaneous modernity” no matter geographical location or political circumstance. Singapore and other regional neighbours are no exception and, with each highway, airport or shopping mall project, religiously attempt to fit into this conceptual paradigm of what it means to be modern. 

With a background in architecture, the artists sought to reveal and upset the formal logics residing in the spatial and temporal hegemony of these dominant infrastructures of modernity.

In Singapore, infrastructure works almost seamlessly to create the impression of a ‘tropical city of excellence’ – a slogan that was used to steer the country’s development for a period of time in the late 1980s into the 2000s. From the perfectionist, borderline obsessive manicuring of buzzcut lawns to the bewilderingly phantasmagoric Supertrees in Gardens by the Bay that boast a transcendent state of harmony between man, nature and technology, Singapore is a city that constantly frames its success in relation to the environment. More often than not, this is an antagonistic relationship between the city and its tropical condition - an inner turmoil that has shapeshifted into various national rhetoric since independence but ultimately remains as a chip on the shoulder inherited from Singapore’s colonial past which emphasised the tropical climate as an ‘other’ against the normative, equivocally pleasant temperate climate.

The title of the artwork, ‘Tropicalia Vulgaris’, is a neologism coined by the artists. ‘Tropicalia’ refers to the Brazilian art movement from the late 1960s which resisted Western portrayals of Brazilian culture and rising militarism of that period, while ‘Vulgaris’ is Latin for ‘of the people’ or ‘common’ – used in scientific species names. Paired together, ‘Tropicalia Vulgaris’ is simultaneously reminiscent of either a tantalisingly sensuous, exotic species of flora found only in an imagined paradise or a rare disease that looms in hidden depths of the jungle. It is a statement that plays on these tropes built on fetishisation and fear to elicit alternative ways to engage with the tropical environment at both a local and regional scale. The multimedia installation sought to reframe the ‘unruliness’, ‘disorderliness’ and ‘chaos’ of tropical nature (and all its seen and unseen agents) into a new spatial and political force that usurps Singapore’s dominant logic of efficiency and technocracy.

As a contextual primer, the photographs are a visual archive of moments in which immaculately controlled infrastructure, with all its typical heavy-duty swagger, is sometimes breached by the simplest of forces – be it rain or greenery. Creeping greenery, unruly vegetation and tempestuous storms extend an invitation towards a unified resistance between human and non-human forces, against the disciplinary tendencies of modern infrastructure. Contrary to tourist-targeted images of Singapore as a highly choreographed ‘City in Nature’, these photographs showcase instances of unruliness fuelled by the biotic and abiotic agents within the tropical environment, framing them as potentialities of radical abundance. This abundance refers to a more generous, affectual and liberating dimension of urban experience, rather than a purely extractive one calculated in quantifiable terms. It is in this alternative realm that the sculptures exist as well.

The sculptures imagine a future in which three pieces of iconic Singaporean infrastructure – the Singapore Flyer, Benjamin Sheares Bridge and a public housing slab block – are transformed through the political act of appropriation. From this, a new formal language evolves through a change in spatial syntax, one that borrows the logic and aesthetics of the non-human forces depicted in the photographs. 

Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant characterizes the current political age as a scene defined by “the infrastructural breakdown of modernist practices of resource distribution, social relation, and affective continuity”. Infrastructure figures prominently here in our transitional approach – political activity is to reinvent infrastructure for managing the unevenness, ambivalence, violence and ordinary contingency of contemporary existence.

Modern society often pits man against nature in a battle of order versus chaos. In this imagined future, human and non-human actors create new topologies out of existing infrastructural topographies. Juxtaposing weight and filigree, homogeneity and heteroglossia, the sculptures present two distinct aesthetic languages that exist dialectically. Dominant infrastructure, the basic ‘substructure’ of current society, is represented in dark, solid wood – homogenous, unassuming yet formative. In exuberant contrast, an alternative socio-ecological system, composed of multi-species inhabitants, prototypical structures and fixtures, parasitically latch onto the somber wood. Fashioned out of a multitude of discrete components, the appropriations function as new infrastructural ecosystems in themselves, recomposing a radically abundant and organic experience of everyday life within. This new aesthetic favours individual and collective empowerment over centralized governmentality, cooperation over competition, existing with nature instead of existing despite nature. While dominant infrastructure attempts to express a singular narrative, these otherworldly formations mutate and resist any singular function, opening themselves up to plural interpretations and a flourishing of mutable potentials through dynamic partnerships and contestations between all agents – human and non-human alike.

Perhaps more akin to the exotic plants or microscopic pathogens alluded to in the phrase ‘Tropical Vulgaris’, these hybrid structures embody a spatial logic and political force that challenge the organisational hegemony of modern infrastructure and support new generative relations of generosity and mutual care that tend to be alienated in capitalist systems. In light of the global energy crisis, the Singapore Flyer is powered down. Its prime, unshaded airspace is taken over by an acrobatic manoeuvre of scaffolding, planter beds and greenhouses. A tourist attraction duplicated from global counterparts becomes an extravagant community garden.

With a dramatic reduction in the number of energy-guzzling cars, the Benjamin Sheares Bridge faced obsoletion after decades of privileging networks of speed in our cities. In a bold move, the loadbearing capacity of the bridge is put to use to support the weight of new housing that clings onto its underbelly. Inhabitants break holes in the bridge’s surface to bring light and water downwards, creating reflective pools of water held as commons. A static object embodying speed and connectivity now shelters an evolving settlement.

Public housing blocks were designed to lift people off the ground, away from dirt, noise, and pollution. Although meant to exclude nature, these large sun-facing surfaces and long horizontal bands along the slab block are perfect for the cultivation of runners like bamboo. These ‘machines for living’ are turned into whole ecosystems that house both human and non-human beings. Through these various provocations presented, the installation prefigures future forms of counterculture in which people respond to immediate political and ecological crises at the scale of the everyday, upsetting the intended functions and metaphors of our collectively inherited infrastructure.

When art or creative fiction is tasked with the mammoth endeavor to dream up futurist visions, practitioners often lapse into two modes: a premonition of existing extractive technological systems and infrastructure taken to an extreme - hyperbolic dystopia, or a techno-optimistic fantasy that fervently glorifies the big and bold megalopolis with its seamless cyber-corporeal interfaces and high-tech panaceas. ‘Tropicalia Vulgaris’ rejects future fictions written from the top-down. Infrastructures for the future should not rest on the current logic of progress which demands ‘more, but bigger and better’. More so than any particular physical manifestation, ‘Tropicalia Vulgaris’ puts forth a desire to collaborate with fellow cohabitants of modern infrastructure that already demonstrate how to boldly break through concrete and transform matter itself. In this horizontal allegiance, we ought to look to those who are stepping into the future alongside us for guidance and wisdom on how to rebuild slowly and intentionally. 

In a similar vein, urban theorist Swati Chattopadhyay advocates for an ontological priority of the people, as undifferentiated potential, and demands more attention be given to the process of “cultural mediation” in which the spatial practices of people forced to navigate between dominant power structures and individual desires coalesce into a highly visible and powerful subaltern culture that, in turn, completely rewrites the urban environment. Simply put, ‘Tropicalia Vulgaris’ presents this proposition: perhaps the future can be ushered, not with violence, but unhurriedly and firmly through the accretive, accumulative critical mass of countless everyday acts that bravely forge a way forward amid quotidian conditions. And in these daily practices, we must ask ourselves, who do we bring with us into the future and what are we leaving behind?