Go to the 5th floor of Parkway Parade Office Tower via the lift at any time and speak or sing a poem/song that invokes memories of a place that is no more, a place and time that you miss.
Significance:
Remembering 5th Passage: where artists gathered informally, and in earnest, decades ago; where artist-initiated events took place and made history. A visionary, non-profit independent arts space, it occupied a walkway access to the carpark in the Office Tower block of Parkway Parade. This instruction serves as an invocation of meaningful conversations, creative friendships, and collaborative work.
From 1991 to 1993, 5th Passage transformed an incidental passageway into a thriving interdisciplinary arts space. Far ahead of its time, it organised projects dealing with environmental issues and animal ethics, and upheld artists as a cooperative for mutual support. Its myriad events involved collaborations with The Substation, Lasalle, various schools, and the public. However, its work was short-circuited: unjustly, it was evicted in early 1994, taken to court, and then purposefully occluded from Singapore’s arts historical context. The site still remains, with not a trace of what, for a time, it once was.
(Remembering also The Substation’s walled garden, that once was.)