Simon Soon
Early on when the Penang team of Site and Space in Southeast Asia began planning for our first field school in Penang, each team member was called upon to nominate a site or an area that was related to their research interest. This helped us to narrow down a list of sites where we wanted to think collectively together, even if each specific site might not be of central importance to every participant’s project.
In September 2018, the first field trip had the broad ambition of learning through being on-site, learning how to work together as a team and becoming real friends. We also planned to reach out to significant knowledge producers in Penang. Besides spending a lot of time visiting different places in Penang, we bonded with each other as well as engaging with senior academics, institutionally affiliated and independent researchers and state officials. More importantly, we felt that it was crucial to reach out to various cultural workers in the heritage sectors and members of the contemporary art scene. Below is a brief list of sites we were able to cover.
A week before we came together in Penang, team members were asked to do preliminary research on their chosen site with the idea that when we conduct our field trip, the team member who selected the site would also be the main guide to provide everyone else with an overview of why the site is a subject of interest. This drew on the expertise of each participant, providing us a window into the presenter’s academic background so that we begin to appreciate the strengths and values that each discipline brings to the conversation about site and space.
Napong ‘Tao’ Rugkhapan provided the much needed ‘buka panggung’ (opening the arena) by offering a tour of the core heritage zone of George Town and an overview of current heritage discourse and practice. This was analysed alongside the stories found in the steel-rod sculptures ‘Marking George Town’, a Penang State government commission to celebrate George Town’s UNESCO listing in 2009.
Raisa Kamila took us from Kapitan Keling Mosque to the Malay Mosque on Lebuh Aceh to explore the cultural factors that contributed to the early-twentieth-century Islamic culture of the Penang cosmopolis. This encompassed films, novels, religious reformation, as well as Penang’s ties and connections to Cairo, Istanbul, Aceh, and Medan.
Lawrence Chua conjured the spoils of Penang’s compradors in a walking tour along the millionaire’s row on Jalan Sultan Ahmad Shah. The mansions and villas built along northern coastline were used to illustrate the way that architectural anomalies could be a possible departure point to explore composite spatial designs and how these are evidence of the way that competing cultural values are negotiated through building design.
Sam I-Shan pointed our attention to Jerejak island, which required us to hire a boat and ferryman from a local fishing village. The team bonded over the experience of being chased off Jerejak by Indian gangsters who found our story, of wandering into a seemingly abandoned holiday resort with plastic tulips planted into its sand beachfront, unconvincing.
Juno Ooi conducted a ‘psychogeographic tour’ into the pulsating heart of Penang’s futurism – KOMTAR tower. Her literary background supplied us with a reading of Penang’s brush with modernism – its ambition and foibles – as well as the possible world-building narratives that can help us make sense of an arcade in the postmodern age.
The group exercise of asking each team member to lead a tour of these site was intended to be a creative one. Though our central goal was to survey a diverse range of built environment, to prospect the ecology of a port city and to discover its many historical layers, we felt that doing this group exercise also encouraged us to think of a site as an area that exists or existed amongst others. Thinking of 'site and space' in a generous way requires imagination on our part as scholars. Needless to say, it was all these things as well as a bonding activity.