Pogo Bar:
Amanda Lee Koe
A Cyborg Island Manifesto
Courtesy the artist
Maybe she’s born with it; maybe she’s relentlessly pursued extensive body modifications ever since the pubescence of independence from her colonial overlords. You name it, Singapore’s done it – land augmentations, coastline fillers, swamp reductions, urban enhancements, highest per capita installed rate of air-conditioning in Southeast Asia – utilizing high-tech ingenuity and cosmopolitan hybridity to transition from her assigned embodiment (small, devoid of natural resources, hot and wet) towards her deepest and truest expression of selfhood. And this sparkling but strict Southeast Asian city-state has achieved spectacular results, be it the self-sufficiency of alchemizing her own waste materials into potable water or the power-play of displaying “exotic” temperate flora from Western climes in luxury greenhouses. Our girl is unabashedly aspirational. The sky’s the limit. But something is holding Singapore back from manifesting her fullest potential and brightest radiance. For how can she shine while still cleaving to normative ways of thinking and being that hide that she is a trans cyborg island?
Rewiring old narratives and baring new skins to mirror and affirm her economically liberal but socially conservative birth country’s agency and urgency to come out as Other and embrace the trans/formative potential within, Amanda Lee Koe’s A Cyborg Island Manifesto (after Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, 1985) is a performance and a polemic that subverts cold technocratic space and straight linear time via the tropical glitch of queer futurism.
Amanda Lee Koe is currently a literature fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program.
Supported by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program
