2011
Novel, 226 pages, softcover
Curated by Heman Chong
Designed by Joanne Pang
Published by The Substation
A traveller begins a journey in pursuit of a singular purpose: to seek certitude within the uncertain. Among the characters encountered, there are those who never sleep, those who cannot stop writing, those who have lost their memories and those who are too in the midst of a travel.
Several Islands was written based on the memories of over forty individuals—artists, writers, academics, curators and bureaucrats—who have encountered the Substation, Singapore’s first independent contemporary arts space, over the past two decades of its existence. Re-processing these memories as fictive threads that express the tensions, confluences and potentialities that mark our contemporary condition, the novel seeks to form an archipelago of ideas within which drifts the scattered fragments of an institutional past.