Autogenous Culture as Political Form

Chapter 2: Participatory Art in a government institution Inner Journeys at Kellock Centre The following account narrates my experience of conceptualising and conducting a participatory arts programme at Kellock Centre (KC) together with two drama facilitators. KC is a disciplinary centre for male inmates. Programmes at KC have the aim of rehabilitating its inmates towards social integration through a range of programmes, as inmates are given opportunities that will encourage them to make the right choices upon release in the hope that they will contribute to society by becoming responsible and contributive citizens. It can thus be posited that KC is part of the “anatomo-politics of the human body” (original emphasis Foucault 1978:139) that forms a part of Foucault’s “great bipolar” technology of power which directs the “performance of the body” (1978:139) through institutions and instruments of discipline and education in order to optimize the capability of each human body to be better integrated into “systems of efficient and economic control” (1978:139). Within this discourse of disciplinary power, what form of speech can art take within the walls of KC? The following narrative, written from memory and documentation of lesson plans, feedback, personal notes, reflections and interviews reveal personal processes, collective responses and moments of meaning-making which lend significance to the art made between 2005 to 2006 with a group of 16-20 inmates from KC. This subjective, autobiographical narrative is subsequently subject to a reflexive analysis, detailing how readings that frame the artwork come to define the meaning and significance of the art produced by this community of participants. And so my story begins: It was March 2005. I had started sessions at Kellock Centre in 2004 together with a drama facilitator and a social worker. Back in 2004 we had a hard time convincing the Director of KC to let us conduct art and drama sessions at KC. The counsellor at KC was enthusiastic and supportive, and it was mostly because of her effort that we were allowed entry. At that time, life skill issues, such as ‘anger management’, were taught to the inmates from an overhead projector. Our proposed sessions used drama and art to bring up and discuss issues faced by the inmates, including anger issues amongst other things. The use of therapeutic methods through the arts was, from my understanding, something they had not done before, and this was why the counsellor was game to give it a try. I wasn’t terribly experienced with using art in this way, and less so in male disciplinary centre. I was a full-time art teacher then and was more familiar with Cambridge examination requirements for art. However, I was bored with these requirements and figured that art couldn’t just be about exams. Having graduated from Goldsmiths College with a degree in Fine Art, I also wanted to take my public installation and performance work further. I had an interest in the characteristics of different sites and eventually became interested in the people who resided in these sites. I tried to make art interesting and relevant to my students in the site of the school. We had a lot of fun doing this, the students and I – creating all kinds of installations all around the school and making strange videos. I was also the form teacher of a Normal Technical class. Normal Technical students typically fare badly in school, and have little reason to like and remain in school. I was looking for an arts programme that would be more about life, less about achieving skills and found the Development Through Drama programme (DTD) at the Necessary Stage. This programme aimed to use drama techniques to instill confidence and self-esteem in its participants. More importantly the space of drama was not an authoritative ‘teaching’ space, but one that explored issues with the students to come up with dilemmas and possibilities out of those dilemmas. Then I lost one student in the Normal technical class. She had dropped out. I wasn’t sure what I lost her to but I was quite sure she was on the street, if not in school, and in no time would be in trouble with the law. I thought to myself then, that the drama programme was for the converted – the students who wanted to come to school. The programme was perhaps lost to the student who might have had the most to gain from it – the one who dropped out of school. What was the point then of having Development Through Drama in school? It needed to be on the street, in the institutions of disciplinary reform. I then hatched a plan to conduct art and drama sessions at KC for the purpose of “facilitating creativity and self-expression”, aiming to develop “self-awareness and esteem”, giving participants “confidence and an inner awareness in facing life’s choices and obstacles” . This is when I started to look for a way into the governmental disciplinary centres during the school holidays. Official calls to these centres got me nowhere. One day I literally bumped into a friend teaching at Kellock Centre. She introduced me to the resident counselor and that was how it all started. A year later, in 2005 I was carrying 4 large canvases into KC, a whole lot of paint, brushes, colour pencils and paper (there were no art facilities or materials in KC) to the main gate, where a troop of guys would cart them for me to the library. The library was located somewhere in the center of the site. We needed to pass through quite a few electronic iron gates to get there. The library was one of the few spaces which was air-conditioned for the inmates and given Singapore’s climate of heat and humidity, an air-conditioned space was more comfortable to work in. It was basically the size of two classrooms with shelves and 3 tables lining the side of the room. We could conduct our sessions on the floor in the middle of the shelves. It was quite an ideal space, except that for art, the guys had to get water in pails, and we had to do the art on the floor.