We’re familiar with receiving assignments.
|
Learning has always been relational. It is made with others, carried through exchange, and shaped over time. It moves through bodies, families, habits, and gestures repeated in everyday life. Much of what we know is not always named as knowledge. It is sensed, practiced, and passed on through living. A Mobile Library for Collective Knowledge extends an ongoing inquiry into how knowledge circulates beyond formal institutions, through lived, embodied, and intergenerational practices. It asks what becomes visible when we pause to notice the forms of knowledge held close to us, the ones returned to for comfort, survival, joy, repair, and care.
The installation is one layer of this inquiry. It presents a surface of invitations, prompts, and contributions, shaped by a wider ecology of conversations, workshops, and shared making across Singapore and the UK. Here, knowledge does not begin as something to extract or deliver. It emerges through listening, trying, sensing, adapting, and returning. It appears not only as content, but as relationship.
This approach draws from pedagogies that understand learning as relational and inseparable from care. Extending beyond the classroom, the work asks what it means to learn with one another without centring authority or performance. It shifts from delivering knowledge to creating conditions where knowledge can surface, be exchanged, and be transformed. Across contributions, certain patterns recur: play and imagination, ecologies of care, and ways of knowing that are poetic, practical, embodied, and communal. What emerges is not a shared answer, but a field of resonances and differences. Cultural context shapes what feels urgent, tender, or teachable. Some offerings lean toward practical strategies for living. Others dwell in memory and reflection. Together, they hold both difference and connection without forcing resolution.
Before institutions, marketplaces were also sites of learning. Knowledge travelled through presence and exchange, in gestures, timing, and trust built over repeated encounters. These were not simply transactions, but rituals of attention. Knowledge moved through hands, through memory, through the body. In this sense, the work resonates with forms of knowledge that are collective, intuitive, and shaped by context. Knowledge here does not live only in what can be formalised. It also lives in sensing, in contradiction, in repetition, and in the patience of time. It lives in what is often overlooked: the informal, the intuitive, the unfinished.
Borrowing from this lineage, the installation imagines knowledge as something carried, gifted, and shaped in public. Contributions appear as handwriting, sketches, fragments, and unfinished thoughts. Their rawness is kept intact because learning is rarely polished. It arrives partial, situated, and in motion. Visitors are invited not to perform expertise, but to recognise that everyday life holds forms of knowing that matter. Contributions act not as answers, but as openings, invitations to try, notice, make, remember, or offer something onward. Knowledge is not fixed. It is activated through encounter and reshaped through response.
An invitation here is not a demand, but a form of hospitality. It makes room for someone else, and gestures toward the quieter exchanges that sustain learning: time spent together, trust built slowly, stories shared, and the courage it takes to offer something of lived experience.
The installation is one layer of this inquiry. It presents a surface of invitations, prompts, and contributions, shaped by a wider ecology of conversations, workshops, and shared making across Singapore and the UK. Here, knowledge does not begin as something to extract or deliver. It emerges through listening, trying, sensing, adapting, and returning. It appears not only as content, but as relationship.
This approach draws from pedagogies that understand learning as relational and inseparable from care. Extending beyond the classroom, the work asks what it means to learn with one another without centring authority or performance. It shifts from delivering knowledge to creating conditions where knowledge can surface, be exchanged, and be transformed. Across contributions, certain patterns recur: play and imagination, ecologies of care, and ways of knowing that are poetic, practical, embodied, and communal. What emerges is not a shared answer, but a field of resonances and differences. Cultural context shapes what feels urgent, tender, or teachable. Some offerings lean toward practical strategies for living. Others dwell in memory and reflection. Together, they hold both difference and connection without forcing resolution.
Before institutions, marketplaces were also sites of learning. Knowledge travelled through presence and exchange, in gestures, timing, and trust built over repeated encounters. These were not simply transactions, but rituals of attention. Knowledge moved through hands, through memory, through the body. In this sense, the work resonates with forms of knowledge that are collective, intuitive, and shaped by context. Knowledge here does not live only in what can be formalised. It also lives in sensing, in contradiction, in repetition, and in the patience of time. It lives in what is often overlooked: the informal, the intuitive, the unfinished.
Borrowing from this lineage, the installation imagines knowledge as something carried, gifted, and shaped in public. Contributions appear as handwriting, sketches, fragments, and unfinished thoughts. Their rawness is kept intact because learning is rarely polished. It arrives partial, situated, and in motion. Visitors are invited not to perform expertise, but to recognise that everyday life holds forms of knowing that matter. Contributions act not as answers, but as openings, invitations to try, notice, make, remember, or offer something onward. Knowledge is not fixed. It is activated through encounter and reshaped through response.
An invitation here is not a demand, but a form of hospitality. It makes room for someone else, and gestures toward the quieter exchanges that sustain learning: time spent together, trust built slowly, stories shared, and the courage it takes to offer something of lived experience.
|
|
Think of knowledge as something alive - not just facts, but stories, habits, experiences, personal wisdom, secret recipes, family sayings, or creative tricks that help you navigate the world.
What’s something you know, that you’d like someone else to discover through doing?
A Mobile Library for Collective Knowledge
Commissioned for Brent Biennial 2025
University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom
in collaboration with Aaron Lim and assignment co-authors, supported by National Arts Council
A Mobile Library for Collective Knowledge is a cross-cultural participatory art project that reimagines the library as a living platform for shared knowledge-making. Developed through an open call and workshops with the public and young people from Singapore and the UK, including students from Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Westminster, it invited participants to rethink how knowledge is created, exchanged, and valued. By reframing the library as a mobile and evolving framework shaped by lived experience and collective contribution, the project challenges traditional knowledge hierarchies and proposes a more inclusive model of cultural exchange.
Through installation, workshops, and public activation, the project explores how knowledge circulates, evolves, and connects across communities. Rooted in the belief that everyone carries valuable embodied knowledge, it brings together contributions from Singapore and the UK into a living collection that grows through participation. In doing so, it positions knowledge as relational, dynamic, and collectively shaped rather than fixed or singular.
Can community-led knowledge exchange inspire new ways of knowing, learning, and being? Developed with spatial designer Aaron Lim, the installation invites participants to move, experiment, share, and co-create, contributing their own ideas and experiences to the mobile library. Each response becomes part of an evolving collection shaped by creativity, collaboration, and cross-cultural exchange.
Through installation, workshops, and public activation, the project explores how knowledge circulates, evolves, and connects across communities. Rooted in the belief that everyone carries valuable embodied knowledge, it brings together contributions from Singapore and the UK into a living collection that grows through participation. In doing so, it positions knowledge as relational, dynamic, and collectively shaped rather than fixed or singular.
Can community-led knowledge exchange inspire new ways of knowing, learning, and being? Developed with spatial designer Aaron Lim, the installation invites participants to move, experiment, share, and co-create, contributing their own ideas and experiences to the mobile library. Each response becomes part of an evolving collection shaped by creativity, collaboration, and cross-cultural exchange.