ABSTRACT
The architectural essay film 03-FLATS follows the domestic lives of three single women across Singapore’s ‘heartlands’, capturing such quotidian activities as cooking, cleaning and crafting. Against a national public housing policy that is pro-heteronormative in its occupancy and composition, these women represent and produce an alternative optics of home. Of interest to this chapter, the film broaches disciplinary questions into the adjacencies between architecture and film—a growing area of interdisciplinary interest. Departing from film as an instrument of ethnographic and anthropological documentation to a mode of architectural representation, I situate film as creative––in its ability to physically produce an archive and reproduce subjectivities, and in its psychical and projective capacity to convey meaning and desires. Thus, more than tracing discourse of either public housing or architecture and film, 03-FLATS necessitates meditation on academic practices of ‘writing up’ creative practice. As sensual, experiential and affective, film is not replaced by writing; writing occurs ‘nearby’ 03-FLATS, drawing out its methodological complications and theorising both the subject it depicts and how they are depicted.
