Community Projects
An Inside Look at Our Community Projects
End-of-life conversations can take many forms, and sound different each time, depending on the individuals involved in diverse contexts. We have been fostering end-of-life conversations in communities through our various projects that adopt arts and creative approaches. This involves community members, artists, designers, creative producers, organisation partners, volunteers, funders and many others. Each project is different, depending on the envisioned outcomes.
Community development occurs over a longer period and involves a process in which community members are engaged and agents of change. It requires active participation and collaboration towards shared objectives over time. What this looks like in the process can be different as each community has distinct identities, assets, needs and cultures. Ultimately, the hope is to see communities embracing their agency and creativity, and existing together in solidarity, supporting each other to live well, and leave well.
Community engagement involves encouraging community members to participate and contribute. Over the years, we have engaged residents in different communities to reflect, dialogue, and co-create with artists on what it means to live well, and leave well. These responses, as artworks, are then shared with the wider community, eliciting further responses. Community members experienced personal growth, gained clarity and confidence in having end-of-life conversations, and formed their community through our engagement process which includes arts workshop.
Public outreach is a strategic effort to engage with diverse audiences. It involves creating meaningful connections, breaking down barriers, sparking conversations, and inviting people to explore and experience topics related to living well, and leaving well. This involves understanding the target audience’s interests and concerns, tailoring approaches, creating arts programming and participatory activities that resonate with them while challenging and expanding their perspectives. Between 2013 and 2022, different editions of Both Sides, Now targeted different types of publics such as healthcare workers, residents, seniors, families, and the Malay-Muslim community.
Community Voices
“I always thought death and dying was a sensitive topic that people would usually avoid. But seeing how people in the community are willing to talk about and embrace it as part and parcel of life is really inspiring and interesting.”
Community Development
A year-long arts and asset-based community development approach enabling communities to support one another to live well, and leave well, with lead artist Salty Xi Jie Ng. Through workshops, intimate conversations, and co-creating artworks for an exhibition, 8 senior collaborators explored their personal experiences and narratives as well as developed competencies on how to have end-of-life conversations.
Community Engagement
An exhibition where expressions of love and regret are captured through the artworks of community participants and artist, Dahlia Osman.
Inspired by the Chinese characters huo dong, where huo is to live and dong is to move, the participatory experience asked community participants to rediscover their environment through the aural expression qualities of the familiar and the mundane, thus reinventing the meaning of the everyday for themselves.
Residents of Blk 7 Telok Blangah Crescent were invited to the void deck studio to pose for a video-portrait. The activity focused on the moments before and after the shutter clicks - as residents shared how they want to present themselves, why they chose this moment to capture for eternity, and for whom?
This film is about a cooking series. It looked at food as a remembrance of a person’s life and asked people to select recipes they would like to be remembered by. The participants in the series also demonstrated how they cook their selected dishes.
Showcasing sympathy blankets - offered to the family of the deceased and hung at funerals - created by Chong Pang residents after they spent time at a workshop contemplating the end-of- life and how to come to terms with death.
The Gift is an invitation to contemplate a last gift for someone in each participant’s life. Each gift that was made in this artist-led project, signified a person’s reflection of what is significant to them, what they wish to leave behind, and a unique relationship between two people, in life and death.
Using documentary footage of senior participants as a starting point and weaving in the images of a lifetime that were excavated from old photo albums, the three short films tell us how each senior has been differently dealing with delicate issues of death and dying that are present in their daily lives.
Public Outreach
This edition of Both Sides, Now focused on engaging the Malay-Muslim community to explore end-of-life conversations.
It began with Kata-Kata Kita (Our Words, 2021), a hybrid variety show for the public to learn more about end-of-life matters, and share their stories.
Following this success, Lepaskan Sesalan (Release Your Regrets, 2022), a multi-disciplinary arts festival held at Heartbeat@Bedok offered a safe space for the community to continue the conversation on death, dying and bereavement.
Both Sides, Now had a multi-year presence in two communities - Chong Pang and Telok Blangah - to forge a deeper level of engagement.
Through a community-based, arts-driven approach, this edition aimed to strengthen social ties and motivate sustainable involvement among community members.
Its ultimate goal was to support individuals and families in making informed decisions about end-of-life plans.
The Wind Came Home, a puppetry performance about end-of-life topics and making difficult decisions went on a tour to 50 senior centres across Singapore.
As seen through the eyes of a stray cat, the play tells a story of an elderly couple struggling to make end-of-life choices and care plans, when one of them suffers from dementia while the other is diagnosed with cancer.
The second edition of Both Sides, Now continued to be a multi-disciplinary immersive arts experience, this time held in the residential areas of Khatib and Toa Payoh.
The project brought end-of-life topics, and created spaces for end-of-life conversations to residents’ doorsteps, to create awareness, encourage reflection and engender opportunities for conversations with loved ones, friends and neighbours.
The inaugural edition of Both Sides, Now was a multi-disciplinary immersive arts experience held over three weeks at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital.
It aimed to create awareness, encourage reflection, and provoke conversations around end-of-life issues among healthcare professionals, caregivers, and the general public.
