Superlative Futures is a transdisciplinary design and research studio in Singapore and is co-founded by Wong Zihao and Liu Diancong. The research practice centers on creative modes of landscape representation to advocate new ways of seeing, and through that speculate alternative futures where cities might better co-exist with more-than-human worlds. They see their design output as a practice of care. They have exhibited at NUS Museum and were supported by Singapore Art Museum’s inaugural Design Research Fellowship, 2024-2025. Zihao received his PhD in Architecture at the National University of Singapore in 2023, having completed a design-research thesis on intertidal practices of care. Alongside his research practice, he teaches at NUS’ Department of Architecture, and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts / the University of Arts. Diancong currently practices as an architectural designer, after completing his Master of Architecture at NUS in 2024, exploring sedimentation and alternative conceptions of ground.
Profile Photo credit: Hoong Wei Long
What will become of the map in a future world, after cartography? Will the map become obsolete? Perhaps not so, since the representation of a place—whether through drawing, forms of mark-making or object-making, storytelling, and indeed the humanly act of meaning making, and locating disparate things into webs of association—has always been central to the way we (continue to) make civilisation and inhabit the environment. Yet, to imagine a world after cartography, calls that we (re)think about what other forms of mapping can hold potential beyond a cartographic order, that is, dominant ways of seeing that we have inherited—most times, unquestioned—which by emphasizing the aerial and disembodied satellite vantage from above, privileges human-centric and extractive visions of the landscape.
For 2 weeks, the island Nikoi lends as site of enquiry around matters of grounding, not only functioning as landing grounds and hosting space to reconsider alternative ways of seeing for a shifting (intertidal) landscape, away from the research metropoles inside the city. Walking and drawing the island becomes both a physical method, and conceptual one as well in the act of mapping and re-tracing new relations of self to place. During the research residency, we wish to be led by the namesake of the island—Nikoi—being firstly a derivation of the local language for Papaya (which also brings to mind its sister island’s botanical name Cempedek), with which to draw inspiration through the botanical movement of the fruit plants, tracing from within/between islands and across oceans, other forms of map-making that can trace the terrain through the intimate scales of seed dispersal. We also playfully note the name’s Urdu/Hindi associations to also mean a kind of “divine favour” on one hand, and a “worry or concern” on the other—wherein we play host with both staff and guests (through the format of a map-making workshop) to engage with a plurality of ways of seeing with the ground from human and more-than-human vantages. Through that, the project rethinks how these alternative knowledge maps—after cartography—can attune posthuman sensibilities and more generous (and re/generative) relations towards more-than-human worlds, when we return to the city.
Ubah Rumah is an art residency and archive inspired by stories of our region.
