WE ARE TOAST
By Mark Chua and Lam Li Shuen
About the Film
Kaya Toast.
Are we toast?
Kaya Toast.
We are toast.
We Are Toast is an expanded cinema performance that utilises multiple 16mm film projectors to create a live film. In the performance, 16mm film loops – hand-processed with coffee, pandan leaves and coconut milk – feature vignettes of kaya toast: its ingredients, gestures and rituals.
Deconstructing the image of kaya toast, the performance considers its stereotypical association as the “quintessential Singaporean breakfast” in an existential unpacking of the Singaporean psyche and identity. The repetitions of the film loops construct an obsession with an idealised picture of society and self, as it is both layered and dissolved, broken and reformed through audiovisual interventions. Within the performativity of light and cinemachinery, something is revealed underneath the surface of our everyday rituals.
On two 16mm projectors, the film loops are performed and modified live with organic and botanical materials such as kaya, pandan leaves, bread and eggs. The film loops are prepared in varied ways: left in moldy kaya for a period, printed with DIY inkjet image transfer, as well as hand-processed with the organic materiality of kaya toast ingredients – evoking a raw tactility drawn over time. This is accompanied by a live soundscape of minimalist textures responding to the materialising forms of the performed film.
Through light and texture conjured live, We Are Toast draws out what might lie within the image of kaya toast – the traces of a society and its appetites, discontents and memories.
Related Activites
The artists will introduce We Are Toast and have a short Q&A post-performance.
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