This blog post is part of the Random Sampling Singapore project. The Project aims to sample 100 places on the island of Singapore over a one year period in order to gain an unbiased and holistic view of the city state.

On a January afternoon I met Manish Sharma to walk to a coordinate in Tuas. It was the first coordinate in 2022 and it is the coordinate number #1.

Manish is an architect and artist and knew a lot about Tuas as he was involved in planning some of the infrastructure in this area. He suggested to go to the Tuas Lamp Post 1, which is the closest public space to the coordinate.

Manish said, that this street lamp is the only place in Singapore where you are allowed to paste stickers on. When I was googling the post lamp I was reading this paragraph of an article in CNA:

Manish and I were curious and very excited about it. I wanted to see which stickers people are pasting, to see the “Zeitgeist” of Singapore residents willing to go to this most outer area to express themselves.

We contributed some to this installation of stickers, bike gadgets and everything else what people are carrying around those days and willing to hang on a lamp people hardly can approach. Who can spot our contributions in the pictures?

I gave Manish my sample kit to sample the area. He took some stickers that were fallen to the ground. He called the samples “cycling Mecca”. We inhaled the area and looked into the direction of coordinate #1 (and #84 and #93), where we can’t go.

On the way back Manish took some great shots from the road. He was finding an analogy of the coiling barbed wire to the cyclist going around the island finding this Mecca.

Artwork

Manish is in the process of finding his Mecca of art in his inner soul. I hope the coordinate hunt was the same fun for him as for me and helped him to come closer to his inner Mecca. I want to keep the space for this artwork free for him, see if he wants to contribute one more time.