(Artwork featured) Listen to Oblivion at Home: Experimental Documentaries and a City-State’s Continued Developmentalism

This chapter explores the concept of home as a discursive field and examines how it is defined, approached, and debated. By engaging with contemporary struggles in Singapore’s continued developmentalism, the chapter highlights the interwovenness between the meaning of oblivion and the politics of remembrance. Through interviews with arts practitioners and theoretical analysis of their works, the chapter focuses on the distinctive use of sound in experimental documentary projects in and about Singapore. Focusing on the acoustic components in Tan Pin Pin’s In Time To Come (2017) and Migrant Ecologies Projects’ {if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves (2021), I argue that sonic exposition, particularly the asynchrony between auditory and visual, produces an acousmatic listening experience confronting rapid spatial changes and the erasure of collective memories. While acousmatic listening is vital for understanding the concept of home, the use of audio-visual asynchronicity in documentaries reveals a distinct perspective on reclaiming sonic agency in overheard and weak sounds. This approach is informed by Brandon LaBelle’s scholarly works on situating ‘an acoustics of social becoming’ to identify modes of resistance against asymmetrical power dynamics, such as national building agendas that involve rights to remember and re-member.