Open City 2.0

Yeo Chee Kiong | Leslie Sim 

“Roam… Roam… Roam…” explores the overlapping micro-macro perceptions of multiple coexisting city platforms within exclusively curated spaces and times, both physically and digitally, as a twin-city experience. Further developed from the presented First Wave project, Made-in-Singapore Sculptor - The Curiosity Cabinet of The Open City https://sculpture2052.com/open-city-%2F-paris#8d2ec970-36e4-45aa-9d7c-47e79217519f, the artist intends to render an extra layer of roaming in the Second Wave presentation — a third alternative form of roaming alongside the original Onsite Roaming and Online Roaming — through multiple visual channels presented spontaneously. In collaboration with sculptor Leslie Sim, we intend to build the Roaming Highway, which will pass through all the presented artworks, collectively forming a gigantic city installation. By manipulating a group of miniature cars equipped with live-streaming cameras  

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MI8lYFql0Jp21LA1LTk1m53Et_dAjv4U/view?usp=sharing

, visitors will be able to control the movement through their mobile phones via Bluetooth connection, creating a parallel mode of physical interaction within real space and the game-engine platform. 

Nik M Shazmie | Aw Boon Xin | Koh Kai Ting

Sini | Sana | Situ is a trans-local artistic research project that uses an experimental game engine as a worlding machine. Building on Clip Through, developed for the first wave of The Open City, the work connects physical installation, cross-city research, and an exploratory video game. Sinirefers to the physical and material encounter; Sana extends across cities through field research and digital connections; while Situ forms the digital space for roaming. Through scans, casts, objects, sounds, and shared encounters, the work imagines memory as an evolving network rather than a fixed archive.

This collaboration between Nik, Boon and Kai Ting brings together material experimentation, 3D scanning,3D printing, casting, game engines, and immersive environments to explore the relationships between place, memory, and technology. Through shared encounters and field research, they collect fragments from their residency in Paris and translate them across physical and digital forms. Their collaboration is driven by an interest in how objects, spaces, and memories can be displaced, reconnected, and transformed to generate new relationships and ways of experiencing the world.

Andrée Weschler

Definition of Boudoir (noun): A woman’s private sitting room or dressing room in a residence, traditionally found in 17th–19th century European houses. It is a secluded, intimate space used for relaxing, dressing, private conversations, and receiving female guests. In modern usage, it can also refer to a styled space for intimate photography (boudoir photography). 

For Open-City 2026, I’m proposing an immersive installation that transforms a research on eroticism and desire into a sonic language, drawn from readings and varied texts. The work will take the form of a soundscape and a sequence of fragments, exploring the codes of language, the images and the voices of desire across cultures. Texts and phrases drawn from my readings will be voiced and “sonified”, in order to create an intimate atmosphere. By integrating into the Twin-City grid, the device could potentially be shared and synchronized

in real time with platforms located in Paris, Singapore, Taiwan, and/or elsewhere, to bring into conversation the different languages and cultural contexts around the theme of gaze, body, and

intimacy.

In addition to the sound installation, my intention is to create a physical work, a physical installation in the form of wallpaper. As I mentioned earlier, the project I developed during my residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris focused on eroticism. It was a period of research informed by reading as well as visits to exhibitions and museums, and by many houses and interiors from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries featuring tapestries, wallpaper, hangings, curtains, and the like. I would now like to extend this research by creating a contemporary boudoir, inspired by the intimate feminine spaces found in private apartments of previous centuries. 

Chiu, Chieh-Sen

Maps are originally two-dimensional symbols, signifying humanity’s planning and control over space. The creator transforms them into a "rebar network"—a material deeply associated with industrialism and construction—directly pointing toward urban expansion, land development, and the process of modernization. Wax is a material characterized by its "physical transmutation" (the ability to transition from solid to liquid), symbolizing fading, blessing, recording, or preservation across many cultures. Infusing wax into the rigid rebar structure imparts a warm, fragile, and mystical "sense of ritual" to the otherwise cold discourse of development.

This work reflects upon the reality under the ideologies of "development" and "modernization." Within it, we witness the interweaving of human material emotions with the real-world imagery before our eyes (the fusion of emotion and scenery), ultimately achieving a state where the inner mind and the external material world dissolve into one.

Chong Wen Shan

This project explores the traces of the environment left by time, and how people experience these changes — whether they are aware of them, or if they only become visible through memory and comparison. By looking at two different cities, observe both their similarities and differences, in physical space, atmosphere, rhythm, and everyday life. Did people ever feel déjà vu when they went to a new place? Is it the buildings, the spatial layout, the smell, or something more subtle that triggers this feeling? Through this, the project reflects on what is lost over time, and what quietly remains with us as our surroundings continue to transform.

Daniele van Reusel

Having lived in both Paris and Singapore, I have found the train to be one of the most revealing ways of seeing a city.

Beyond its function, the train is a moving frame. It carries us through architecture, neighbourhoods, infrastructures, and

communities. Through the window, the city reveals itself in fragments: buildings, stations, housing, backlands, and passing

scenes that exist between the urban hubs we move towards. Public transport is one of the rare spaces where collective and private experiences overlap. Everyone shares the same carriage, but not the same journey. For some, it is a burden. For others, a pause, a shelter, a place to read, think, listen, observe, or simply exist between two moments of the day.

Every ride carries its own atmosphere. A carriage can hold someone who is asleep, someone drunk celebrating life,

someone crying, someone blasting music, someone having an online job interview, someone quietly looking out the window. It becomes a corridor exposing the ordinary but deeply revealing portrait of urban life, not only at destinations, but in the overlooked spaces and lives unfolding between them.

This proposal creates a bridge between Paris and Singapore through two train lines: the East–West Line in Singapore and Ligne 6 in Paris. Both are green, largely overground, and cross the southern span of their respective cities from east to west. Their elevated routes turn each journey into a continuous observation of place, movement, and the lived environments that exist between each station.

Louise Lindval

UNSEEN explores how remote territories are translated, visualised, and continuously reshaped

through interconnected digital environments. The project begins with bathymetric datasets collected during scientific expeditions to the Arctic

seabed. These datasets describe landscapes that remain largely inaccessible to direct human

perception. Through digital modelling and moving image, the project investigates how hidden

environments are converted into visible and navigable forms. Rather than approaching bathymetric data as a complete or neutral representation, UNSEEN treats it as a partial and provisional image of a territory in motion.

For the Second Wave of The Open City, I propose a floor-based moving-image installation using four 40-inch screens arranged as a single horizontal image surface of approximately 1.80 × 1

meters. A single video file would extend across the four screens, presenting an animated landscape generated from Arctic seabed data. A related version of the bathymetric landscape is also being considered for The Open City digital

platform, where visitors may be able to move through or roam within the terrain virtually.

The physical and digital environments would not necessarily reproduce one another directly. Instead, they could offer different forms of access to the same inaccessible territory: looking down onto it, moving around it, observing it through a remote device, or entering a reconstructed version of it digitally.

Margot Guillemot 

Paris On Line adopts the form of a performative photographic survey in which I take a single point perspective photography sample. The number of photographic images depends on the number of existing subway stations. Then each image is abstracted and combined in a photomontage. All these bands reveal an artificial perspective as symbol of the urban landscape and a symbolic mathematical rational logic. 

Ng Siok Hoon

“Cloud Roaming” is a spatial exploration of the fluid and ephemeral nature of the natural and digital environment. Literally, it implies navigation from a celestial perspective, viewing from above the sky. Roaming, in this project shall focus on what is experiencing and seen from above: the changing landscape and climate, which affect not only our physical environment but the emotional and cultural narratives ingrained within them.

The second wave seeks to collect shared memories of lived experiences of environmental vulnerability due to urban expansion and unstable climate, to find connections and evoke resonance among the people in both cities. The focus will be placed on collecting stories on how these changes impacted on everyday routine of ordinary people. An archive of shared

memories will include contribution from the artist and participants in the form of online research, oral histories and survey, which will be selectively translated into visual narratives and re-present as an installation and a series of 3D printed sculptures.

Ron Tu

The Thread of Light responds dynamically to visitor movement., bringing the physical and virtual realm. By shifting in temperature and intensity, the photons physically highlight the similarities and essential differences between the twin cities, transforming a complex spatial layout into a unified, multi-sensory story.

Tan Yen Peng

• Phase 1 of the Mnemosyne Arcade mimicked an arcade of "shop windows," presenting image pairings side by side, each emphasizing a shared punctum that invited viewers to engage emotionally with their resonances. Throughout, "poor images" were used prominently, celebrating their accessibility and imperfections as democratic carriers of memory.
• Building on this, Phase 2 is envisioned to evolve the arcade from a display of pre-curated pairings into a live, generative environment. Drawing on a pool of "poor images" pre-collected from open-access Singaporean and French archives, the installation would produce fresh juxtapositions in real time, so that the punctum might emerge through discovery rather than predetermined arrangement.
• At its heart would be real-time printing. Each pairing or grouping could be printed on the spot — an ephemeral, low-cost print that mirrors the poor image itself. Over the exhibition, these prints would gradually accumulate within the space, building toward a growing atlas where memory is staged not as a finished archive but as an ongoing process of accretion.
• In challenging the controlled, algorithm-mediated visibility of digital platforms, Phase 2 aims to make the act of "excavation" live and tangible, returning poor images to a shared physical space.

Tia Fatihah

My work aims to explore the parallels between the folklore and mythologies of France and Singapore. It reveals how very  distant cultures - in terms of geography, as well as ethnicity - are able to construct very similar mythologies to make sense of fear and the unknown. Would this suggest that mythologies are less influenced by geography, and instead stems from shared human experiences and psychology?

One example of a parallel would be the Gargoyles, Chimeras, and Grotesques found commonly on medieval European cathedrals, churches, and castles. Many interpret these statues as stone demons,

meant to ward off evil-forces that lurk outside these sacred spaces.

In a similar vein, Singapore has many lion statues (石獅; shíshī) commonly guarding homes or temples. These statues come in pairs, and are often placed on either side of an entrance. These statues are believed to have powerful mythic protective benefits. Symbolically, the female lion

protects those dwelling inside the building, while the male lion guards the structure itself. It is most fascinating how two very distinct countries, located 10,800 kilometres away, are using these imposing stone sculptures to protect people and ward off evil. During this project, I aim to explore more similarities between France and Singapore mythologies, and observe how fear (and the unknown) manifests into these folklores in different cultural landscapes.