Home: Made with Plants

[11/12/2022] On our Home's last day, the sky cried (in Ince's words) with flash floods across Singapore, but sisters and guests braved the rain anyway to gather in our Home for the last time. Over informal tours showing new and old friends around, marigold jewellery-making and banana leaf crafts, we asked:

"What's next?"

"We are 2 years old or more now right? So we put 2 candles." (Ince sharing about her homemade SayurStory wajik cake on slide 5)

This post does not seek to elaborate on the “ethnobotanical uses” of plants featured in the photos (banana leaf trumpet/ torotot on slide 3 among others) but hopes to share insight instead to our community and the relationships between the people within it — and beyond, with other individuals and collectives we have journeyed with, or have only just begun to.

[04/12/2022] At our Home’s first closing weekend, greetings and expressions of welcome and love were exchanged among community members and visitors alike. Throughout the day which we spent together in *full*, we gave and received handshakes (or loving hand grips?), hugs, plants, food, books, handmade crafts, and kisses on the forehead and cheeks.

A first-timer walking into our space/ community may not have known that some of us were meeting for the first time only then, or had only met each other before once. ("Us" and “we” referring to all of us who wore matching shirts — for the first time too — albeit in our different personal favourite colours.) While some of us had made multiple visits to our Home since our residency started in June, others were visiting for the first time. The amount of time that each person had spent with the community and/or in the space however, seemed to have limited effect on the sense of familiarity, belonging and comfort we shared. If some of us had not known each other’s names at the start of the day, that would have changed by the time we walked out of Botanic Gardens at sunset and feasted together at Bebek Ndut (at a noteworthy 14-seater table, highly recommend for large gatherings).

Our Home was very quickly (and organically) filled with people, laughter and conversations around our relationships with plants and *each other*. Beyond “personal and cultural stories on the connection between plants and home”, the sisters shared with visitors a feeling of warmth — of community and home.

*Our home clothes (with different intended functions from organisational uniforms) might have played a role in making us feel at home, but that is of small significance in the story of our community’s journey growing together.

[27/11/2022] “How about you, what is home to you?”

Dear Laila, Ince, Themboi, Precios, Annisa, Bu Nury, Bu Ima and Rachel, home to me (Man Wei)/us is a place of rest that all of us create together even when we are on the move; we’re always moving or dancing in between our lunch break and afternoon programme to shake off some of our fullness (if in the same location). It’s in these moments of transit(ion) and intentional breaks — pauses from our individual routines and daily lives (Mon-Sat) — that I feel at home, with all of you. And I/we (the “volunteers”) are so so grateful for all the time that we share, and hope yall feel the same.

//Always on the side of asking questions and assuming the role of facilitator, I hadn’t expected Laila to have *directed* this question at me after a very sincere reflection of what home meant to her — which came very naturally in the process of building our home. I didn’t give a proper answer then to Laila, but this caption contains part of it (hi Laila, here’s my continued answer!)

Lily, Liza, Armi and Cai Ni, (more names below), I/we wish you were here with us to build our Home: Made with Plants (2.0) within our Home (1.0). This one’s actually made with plants haha and we won’t have visitors asking us why our Home is not made of bamboo walls and an atap roof; the yellow walls in our Home (1.0) have their own story. We built this home (small letter ‘h’) with plants and personal belongings that we’d collected and made together over our 6-month (official) residency in the Centre for Ethnobotany — and beyond, from long before. Armi, your windchime made in Michelle’s garden is the centrepiece of this home. Lily, I took the “banner image” photo of us making the groundwork this time. Liza, Bu Nury was our mom today, bringing us lunch in the most beautiful basket, and Laila is a ate who shares your memories in learning bamboo carpentry from her father, I hope both of you will meet soon. Cai Ni, I wish you could have seen how everyone and everything came together sO naturally today, to build *this home* together — that is as much yours as it is mine/theirs/ours.

To answer your personal curiosity in Michelle’s garden at the start of the year, yes, I noticed everyone tied the ropes a different way, though identifying which rope was tied by who was the last thing I remembered from the day. I did remember making some pretty loose knots though, that Laila very patiently helped me to undo and tighten, like Liza had before (with another type of knot).

// Will return with a better curation of photos next time for words and feelings from the people mentioned in this post.

[NOV] Home: Made with Bambu / Kawayan / ဝါး (Warr)

🌅 [Sunset hours in our Home at closing]

It’s been a memorable 6 months at the Centre for Ethnobotany, but we will be moving out after 11 Dec (last visiting day). A new exhibition will take the place of our Home: Made with Plants, while our community searches for new spaces and forms to call home. To wrap up our Home’s residency in the Centre for Ethnobotany, we will be holding a final open house/ move out party on its closing weekends on 4 and 11 Dec. All are invited to visit/ revisit and gather with new and old members of the community!

Ongoing throughout the day, we will have different pop-up displays and activities curated around our Home’s stories. Highlights include crafting home decor and a gift exchange (of seeds, plants, books and stories) around our own “Christmas tree”, made with plants. Co-curators will also be present to lead *informal* Home tours and show guests around the space (in languages: English, Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog, Burmese). Join in activities you are interested in and come by any time between 10:30AM-12PM and 2:30-5PM — and stay as long as you like :-)

For the full programme of activities, swipe through the photos and refer to our events page! All activities are walk-in and do not require pre-registration, however we would appreciate it if you could let us know you are coming on the RSVP form (click 'Find Tickets' on events page): https://tinyurl.com/homemwp-closing

The form also includes an invitation to join our community’s picnic lunch (potluck) for interested guests (subject to conditions & organising capacity).

Note: community members will still be around from 5-6PM to wind down and reflect on the day and our Home's journey. During this time (closing hour), our Home will still be open for public viewing, but pop-up activities and tours will no longer take place.

🌾 The beginning of November is a personally and culturally significant time for us to revisit our relationship with rice through some of our Home's belongings.

In our Home, we have a single mortar and pestle set which we *use* to share and invite stories of pounding rice with family and community (borrowed from the National Musuem of Singapore's collection, for resolution requirements at our desired scale)...

Lesung and alu/ lusong and hal-o however, take on multiple names and forms within our community. In diverse shapes, sizes and materials, mortars and pestles have been used amongst co-curators and new/ returning visitors, to break down proses of rice in homes across space and time.

[OCT] Home: Made with Rice / Padi / Palay / ေကာက်စိုက် (Khout cite)

Just a few portraits of biko from the community in October, as we cross over into November. The 1st of November is All Saints’ Day. Among Filipino members in the community, the occasion (alongside Halloween and All Souls' Day) is observed with sticky rice snacks like biko, of which we had a good share of making and eating together in the month of October.

Before we dive into a final search for bamboo in our homes in November, we trace our community’s journey with rice across our engagements in the month before (and beyond). In the next posts, we break down proses of rice with a lesung and alu/ lusong and hal-o/ mortar and pestle.

[OCT] Home: Made with Rice / Padi / Palay / ေကာက်စိုက် (Khout cite)

🌾Do you know the journey of rice from farm to table? In October, we held a series of community engagements in the kitchen to explore rice in its different forms (premature, flattened, broken etc.) and how these defined not only flavours, but memories of home. We shared memories of time spent with family and community, growing, cooking and eating together in different home gardens and kitchens.

Drop by our Home this Sunday afternoon for some ricebreakers and rediscover your relationship with padi/rice! Visitors are encouraged to bring along their own cup of rice (uncooked) to participate in a rice planting poll 😉

Event Link: https://fb.me/e/3Wrj8rAuq

[OCT] Home: Made with Rice / Padi / Palay / ေကာက်စိုက် (Khout cite)

[18/09/2022] This is Genelyn's Home Visit (with Liza), photos and words by Genelyn. Liza's first Home Visit in Tagalog was a mini reunion for long-time friends who had not seen each other since the circuit breaker 2 years back (also our first mask-off day in our Home!)

Nearing the end of our 4th month in the Centre for Ethnobotany (moving out in December), we are working on an online guestbook to preserve the memories in our Home and invite more personal connections. For community members who have difficulties accessing our Home in-person, we hope the guestbook provides them with a means of "remote connection" to design their own virtual Home Tours, and reach out to guests from all walks of life, from around the region.

The tortang-to-be (swipe!) banana heart ball hopes it managed to catch your interest and invite you to reexamine your relationship with other underappreciated dishes and ways of eating the banana *fruit from across our homes. In a separate post, we will return to explore the less commonly sold, cooked and eaten banana heart/ jantung pisang/ puso ng saging. But first, dessert (a “sweet soup” with cubes of the saba banana fruit):

Brenda’s bilo-bilo dessert was overflowing with ingredients and conversations, beyond and within the frame of “Singapore food heritage” (whatever we understand that to be), that this post felt a duty to pack reflections on multiple (interconnected) questions in the 10 bite-sized slides allowed.

Who makes the food that each of us calls “food from home”? From whom and how do we learn to make “heritage food”? What are the different names we use for dishes and ingredients/ produce that make home? How can we change the way we understand and connect with different food cultures, plants and people in our homes?

[SEP] Home: Made with Pisang / Saging / ငှက်ေပျာသီး (Nghat Phaw Thee)

“Home is ‘tahanan’, ‘bahay’ is house.” How many names/words for ‘home’ do you have in your home language(s)?
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This month, Liza will be leading the first (formal) non-English tours in our Home, in Tagalog, on top of English tours. For an exhibition that displays writing in English mostly, non-English tours are important to improve the accessibility of the space and its content to other MDW sisters and migrants — a target audience Liza identified for our/her Home in the co-creation process.

In Lily’s August Home Tours, she called on guests to reflect on the differences between a “house” and a “home” (words spoken and meaning as intended in the English language). In Liza’s upcoming Tagalog *and* English Home Visits, she addresses the same questions, drawing from her own personal connections to the space. Navigating language and cross-cultural co-creation for our ‘Home: Made with Plants’ has been a long journey of learning and growing together (and eating and playing).

Liza is one of the four co-curators of our Home, from Oton, Iloilo, Philippines. She is also our community's resident artist and culinary chef, working closely with Lily since our first tours in the Ethnobotany Garden. While Liza needed/ sought mentorship support from volunteers for those tours, she won’t be needing any for her “Home Visits”.

Like Lily, a short visit to the space to refresh her memory was all she asked for. Liza knows the stories in our/her Home by heart, and you can expect her to put her heart and whole self into her Home Visits — to make *all guests, and herself, feel at home.

Liza’s Home Visits are FREE for all to join and takes place in both Tagalog and English. Sign up by 14 September (Wed) at our events page (click 'Find Tickets') to secure a slot and receive a confirmation message at your provided contact number.

Tagalog (11AM-12PM): https://fb.me/e/5Sua9Ktfe
English (2:30PM-3:30PM): https://fb.me/e/295LISmig

[28/08/2022] On the last Sunday of August, Lily led her last home tour with guests from our event in collaboration with . Amongst our guests, Liza and Themboi, our Home's two other co-curators, had made the time to join us and show their support. Maimunah too, a community member who participated actively in co-creation engagements from the beginning, shared about the story she contributed on iwel iwel in-person for the first time. In the month of August, Lily brought a total of 3 different groups around in our Home (a lot more if you count the informal groups). With each group, we grew more comfortable with the space, ourselves and each other.

When September comes, Liza will be welcoming guests to our Home instead. And then in October and November, Themboi and Ince will lead their own home tours, for the first time.

Each co-curator designs and leads her own home tour, because each person relates to the space and stories differently (but also because each person has different personal commitments and schedules; classes to attend, classes to teach, communities to be with, people to support on Sundays*). However shared and interconnected relationships are in our Home (with both plants and people), it is important for each person to have the space and time to make *herself* at home. In the collective narratives of our Home, care was/is taken to ensure the individual’s personal anecdotes are not erased, nor taken as tokens for larger identities.

Our Home feels the most like “home” though, when more/all of us are together. We missed Ince during the tour, but she came afterwards (yay second last pic) with some homemade sweet potato cakes :')

[21/08/2022] Our first banana engagement co-hosted by Lily and Annisa was probably the liveliest we’d ever seen our Home since its public opening. Concurrently alongside Lily’s home tour, the pop-up weaving activity drew a crowd which included many families with young children, from Singapore and abroad.

Exhibitions/ public spaces should be activated, and seek to engage users from all walks of life. In our Home, we wish to connect people from different backgrounds, across generations and cultures, through stories of home and plants (or “ethnobotany”) — while centering the MDW community and individual* women who created it.

While we enjoyed heartwarming exchanges with our guests, we also took away important reflections on the roles that we (non-MDW and MDW volunteer facilitators) play, and the different forms of exchange we hope to encourage in our engagements.

In walk-in sessions centered on learning specific "crafts", deeper engagement with the personal and cultural stories behind the process/ product are more limited. How do we foreground the origin stories and identities of our Home’s hosts — and encourage guests to engage with these important contexts with respect and care? With different guests and hosts, we are learning different ways of connecting with each other and the plants around us.

“What do you want to call these tours then, do you want to call them ‘tours’?”
“Home tour lah”
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Lily is one of the four co-curators of our Home, from Kudus, Jawa Tengah, Indonesia. She is a familiar face from our past ‘Garden of Homes’ tours in the Ethnobotany Garden, leading guests through the medicinal and symbolism zones.

In this Home Tour, co-curator Lily invites you to make yourself at home and rediscover your relationship with plants and communities across the region, from past to present, while reflecting on what home means to you. As part of the tour, you will experience a hands-on crafting activity with banana leaves. Swipe to find out more about what a 'Home Tour' is!

This Home Tour is FREE for all to join and takes place in English, with some Bahasa Indonesia. Limited slots! Sign up by 17 August (Wed) at https://fb.me/e/2bJbhcRsB (click 'Find Tickets') to secure a slot and receive a confirmation message at your provided contact number.

🌳🌳 What names do we give/use for lands with trees? What relationships do we have with woods/ forests/ jungles/ gardens/ nature? How do we talk about these relationships in our different home languages ("national language(s)" / "dialects"/ "mother tongues")?

Most of the stories written and told in our 'Home: Made with Plants' exhibition are in English, with key titles and names in the three main national languages of co-curators (Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog, Burmese). In the co-creation proses/ process (and all of our engagements), English was the default language used to facilitate cross-cultural communication and exchange amongst participants and with facilitators.

🤔😪😑

It is important to note that authors of the stories in our Home speak multiple different home languages, just like the women who wrote the essays in 'Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays in Singapore'.

In our upcoming book discussion organised in collaboration with No Readgrets book club, we explore the relationship between language and nature amongst other topics, combining a home tour and weaving activity led by co-curator Lily.

Limited slots left, interested MDW participants can drop us a message (don't worry about your English! Non-MDW participants can sign up at https://www.eventbrite.sg/e/no-readgrets-x-sayurstory-session-on-28-aug-2022-making-kin-tickets-241553451877.

🍌 Crossing over to August, we begin the search for banana in our homes. In the foods with which we celebrate the birthdays of Singapore (9th) and Indonesia (17th) this month (but also enjoy on a day-to-day basis and for other special occasions), we explore alternative relationships with nature, heritage and community.

It can be easy to miss and overlook the connections between our natural and cultural/ food heritage, when banana leaves (or alternatives that pass like them) lie *under* our ang ku kueh/ ku kue. If you learn to cook and eat traditional foods however (of your own or different cultures), you would learn the importance of using plants and natural ingredients over alternatives - in the taste and process of cooking.

[AUG] Home: Made with Pisang / Saging / ငှက်ေပျာသီး (Nghat Phaw Thee)

🌴🥥 With yesterday’s final coconut engagement, we wrap up a month of gathering with coconuts in July. Old and new faces to the community exchanged stories of using plants for building houses, starting with the coconut tree and its gifts of lumber and leaves for structural supports and roofs. Everyone agreed with Raquel when she said, “In Philippines, we call the coconut the tree of life.” Stories of home around the coconut palm extended beyond its uses in building to revisit flavours of home and crafts marking celebrations with family and community. Dried leaves from our Home’s first coconut engagement were used to demonstrate ways of weaving roofs, and also inspired a ketupat weaving competition.

As we enter August and look forward to celebrating the “birthdays” of two of our home countries, we reflect on the the past, present and future of our homes and the the stories within and about them that we want to tell and preserve. Thanks to Wan for joining us and sharing about his inspiring work at Wan's Ubin Journal! 🏡

Photos by Ince, Lily and Cai Ni.

[JULY] Home: Made with Coconut / Kelapa / Niyog / အုန်းသီ (Aone thee)