cooling off day

2025, photo series

for 24 hours during cooling-off day during the 2025 general election, I took a series of environmental portraits of resident friends around the GE’s strangely drawn and codified electoral boundaries. I asked them then - precisely at those decided lines - to simply find a way to cool off. i mean, it was what it was designated for, right? it was a surreal endeavour, silly taking a sentiment so literally. but i took the bait and indulged. in such a firmly determined flash of events, I raced around the island, imagining how just following an arbitrarily simple framework would create this transient temporary theatre. firmly reality, yet feeling undoubtedly… flimsy. I thought surely, things materialised in ways more than just markings or marketing. at all of these places were supposedly lines - lines we could not see or fathom - but lines nonetheless about to create reality. so it was wise things cooled down and I let them sit, just like the spirit of what it was. it was not wise to react in the moment! to the environments… I supposed, with many laughs

many many hours and months after the heat, these images are strangely comedic. context is needed, I suppose? but in the end, what do simple words connote and create in their power? and how do they evaporate after a temporary temperature? what does the theatre of semantics make, and how are things remembered after the heat is gone? surely opposing it does not change people’s minds I thought. then in a similar way I pour another bucket of water over myself.