---

In this series of original, non-commissioned essays published by Art Industry Insights With Reena Devi, arts journalist and editor Reena Devi explores our collective capacity to critique, to create, to advance, even as the very foundations of our public and creative life collapse and collide.

---

During times of extreme crises and collapse, it is inevitable, imperative even, to focus on individual and collective experiences of war, colonialism, refugee systems, and intergenerational trauma.

At the same time, there are vital stories woven in between these overarching narratives – what happens to the refugees when they land, what happened after a family was separated years ago, what happened to the seven-year-old boy arriving at a port city he has never known, with barely formed memories of his homeland.

Such in-between stories create a potent legacy, while also becoming fuel for producing in-between spaces, even in the unlikeliest of cities.  

As any art industry globetrotter attending Art Basel Hong Kong would know—Hollywood Road is famous for its steep slopes littered with all manner of culinary delights and art spaces including mainstay arts center, Tai Kwun.

What they may not know is that in that very same touristy area stands one of the most popular temples in Hong Kong, Man Mo Temple, built in the mid-1800s, for worshipping the Taoist gods of literature and war.

Intriguingly, the temple served more than a purely spiritual function in the past. One of its original complexes was used as a mediation space to resolve conflicts in the Chinese community during colonial times. This was motivated by the local community’s “desire to resolve issues without taking it to colonial police or government at the time of British rule.”

Closer to home, Singapore is currently celebrating Hungry Ghost Festival, an island-wide month-long annual event rooted in Taoist and Buddhist traditions. The festival transforms social spaces into spiritual spaces, temporary roadside offerings and makeshift altars popping up all around the cosmopolitan city to appease the spirits arriving “when the gates of hell open on the seventh Lunar Month.”

Without diminishing the challenges of “improper burning of joss paper” and “air quality decline”, Hungry Ghost Festival is a reminder that even as Singapore’s independent arts spaces, from The Projector to The Substation, decline in the face of global cultural commodification, unconventional and intangible spaces can still persist.

However, it does raise the looming question – what kind of spaces survive or emerge in the aftermath of dislocation, empire, and migration?

When empires fall, it is not always monuments or museums that survive but in-between stories, such as memories and myths, etched in unexpected places, narrated by unexpected people, echoing across centuries and cultural boundaries.

In the summer of 1913, archaeologists discovered a clay tablet from 1350 BC, with the earliest known written references to Hindu gods – Indra, Varuna, Agni, Mitra, and Nasatya.

Most surprisingly, the tablet, which proved the Rig Veda’s language and belief system were well-established by 1350 BC, was found in Syria.

It was inscribed with a diplomatic treaty between the Hittites and the Mitanni. The latter was a powerful ancient kingdom spanning parts of modern-day Syria, Iraq, and Turkey.

Though the Mitanni people mostly spoke a different language known as Hurrian, their royal names and charioteering terms came from a language closely related to Vedic Sanskrit.

Historians believe that this was due to the influence of Indo-Aryan “mobile warrior aristocracy” who moved into Upper Mesopotamia and northern Syria, using their advanced skills in horse training and chariot warfare as a strategic advantage in the turbulent ancient political landscape of the Middle East. 

Reportedly, several Egyptian queens were of Mitanni origin, such as Princess Kiya, wife of Akhenaten and rival queen to Nefertiti, raising the possibility that Indra, Agni, Varuna and Mitra were worshipped on the banks of the Nile.

To be clear, this is not an ancient argument for which gods are better, this is an argument for the sacred and storied spaces our ancestors carved out between collapse and continuity.

In our current epoch, it is all too easy to get lost in the seemingly existential importance of capital and code. Yet, it is the stories and spaces mentioned above, however ephemeral, that keep resurfacing, exemplifiying ways history defies the repeated rise of protectionism and isolationism amid global turmoil.

Perhaps focusing on in-between legacies is our tangible answer to navigating a future beyond today’s concrete yet collapsing institutions.

At the border of a small village called Aneyoshi, located on the northeastern coast of Japan, stands a century-old 10-foot-tall stone tablet, inscribed with the following warning: “High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”

Over time, the ancestral reminder was disregarded in the face of successful coastal towns and massive seawalls built by the government. However, in places such as Aneyoshi, residents still follow the warnings of the “tsunami stones”.

During this era of ecological collapse, their ancestor’s words have never been more urgent and prescient, reminding us to heed the wisdom of our past, especially when the white noise of our present proves incessant.

Explore other non-commissioned (unpaid) essays in the ongoing series here.

Support independent arts writing here.