Decolonizing the mind means deconstructing the thoughts, preferences and values that derive from a colonial way of thinking. This is a process that inevitably leads to more fundamental questions. What is a colonial way of thinking? Who thinks in this way? How did people’s minds get “colonized” in the first place?
Always question and challenge your internal biases.
Singapore may be distinct from the rest of Southeast Asia, but there is also a hyper-romantic view towards Singapore, trapped in a certain timezone that isn’t certainly past or future. People find Singapore exotic, but in a techno-futuristic sense.
That was one of the conversations we wanted to have. We wanted to bring up Southeast Asian futurism because sci-fi imagination has been mapped and projected by the West, but also East Asia, in particular Japan. Singapore, while distinct, is as you say, trapped in its own romanticised time zone. We also thought about other futurisms: you have Sino-futurism, which has [6] been explored in Lawrence Lek’s works[7], and of course there’s Afrofuturism[8], but the struggles and emancipation of Black bodies is not something we should freely appropriate or imagine to understand. There is also Gulf futurism9 which is also another context worth considering. At the core of our project, questions that came to be also remained: whose futures are we amplifying? Who builds it, and whose voices are left out?