Hampshire Road is a statement on the performance and practice of carcerality enacted through Singapore’s racialised spaces. A cold and devastating document, the video questions the infrastructures of segregation already in place within the architectures of the new pandemic world. Cinema can’t help but be militant. 

Christie Cheng: Hampshire Road is very much concerned with the ways in which hostilities towards migrant workers in Singapore have been made banal and ordinary. Did you see a wider relevance of documenting the site in our current times? And what do you hope your film could reveal?

Min-Wei Ting: Hampshire Road touches specifically on the policing of migrant workers, which recently intensified during the lockdown. The restrictions and treatment towards migrant workers were extremely disproportionate to the rest of society.

It also reflects the broader pattern of othering migrant workers, which is essential to the system of governing and exploiting migrant labour in Singapore. There is a demonstration of power and authority occurring in the film that is out of scale with what we usually see on the streets of Singapore. Anyone who has been here will have hardly noticed any police in public. Whenever police are present in the numbers shown in the film, it is a sign of potential trouble, and the implication here is that migrant workers are trouble.

CC: Perhaps a little context to the site documented in Hampshire Road: the cage-like structure is a bus terminal built after what has been publicly referred to as the “Little India Riot”. In 2013, a migrant worker from India was tragically run over by a bus, inciting other workers in the area to rise in discontent. That evening, buses, ambulances and police vehicles were attacked, including two that were set on fire. The state denied pretexts of labour unrests. Following the incident, alcohol bans were introduced and a range of surveillance strategies were installed around the Little India area. The bus terminal has become emblematic of Singapore’s system of retributive justice.

MWT: It is as though the bus terminal becomes a stage and what we are seeing is a performance that further stigmatises the migrant worker. I think to most people, this seemed like a perfectly reasonable response to the riot. But they are not the ones using this space. I wonder if the government would have done the same if Singaporeans had rioted. What would Singaporeans think if they had to use a similar bus terminal? The answer either way is troubling. We seem ready to internalise the controls and regulations the government imposes, on whoever it might be.

At a Q&A following a screening of the film, someone asked what I thought post-pandemic architectures for migrant worker spaces might look like. I did not provide a satisfactory answer but after mulling over the question afterwards, I came to think future sites would make workers invisible to the rest of society. Many of them are already housed in dormitories on the fringes of the island. Now there is talk of moving all workers’ accommodations away from central locations like Little India into completely self-sustaining dormitories so they would never need to go out except for work – the ghettoisation of migrant workers if you will. Taking this to its logical conclusion, to render migrant workers invisible is a step towards reducing human life purely to its labour function where one is “free” only to work.

CC: What you mentioned about the terminal’s performativity reminded me of Simone Browne’s Dark Matters; in it she describes how surveillance also brands the slave’s body by making them identifiable as commodity. By drawing attention to the terminal’s sterility and harsh luminescence, Hampshire Road presents the site as a surveillance infrastructure that makes their racialisation possible. I see a similar theme in your other work, If For Nothing Else Than For Sunday (2019). Could you say more about the intention behind using a single take to “photograph” the expanse of the bus terminal? 

MWT: What compelled me to make Hampshire Road in one take was the building itself as it occupied the entire stretch of a road. It was also completely open, as if inviting an audience to watch the workers inside. Strangely, this created an opportunity to film it. I could have done so from a distance, but all the detail would be lost. It was important for me to traverse the expanse of the terminal to capture its different facets, ranging from the structure itself to how it was being used. The same impetus was behind If For Nothing Else Than For Sunday.

There is an element of surveillance in both films as each assumes an observational point-of-view. In the case of Hampshire Road, the subjects being watched are the police who in turn are watching the workers. I suppose the film could be a cinematic analogue of smartphone footage of police brutality in the US and in Europe. The contexts and situations are different but what we see in Hampshire Road is also a form of violence. It may not be physical violence but there is also violence in branding and singling out.

CC: I am also curious about your process of filming the police and their policing.

MWT: It was intimidating each time I filmed (I returned numerous times since I intended the film to be shot in one take). I was questioned twice. The first time, I was inside the terminal with my camera when a representative of the bus companies stopped me and said I needed permission to film. When I moved outside, he followed and continued to harass me, demanding to know who I was and why I was filming. Eventually he called the police. The second time, I was inside without my camera but the terminal was empty. A group of policemen saw me, came in and told me I couldn’t be there. I pointed out that the gates were open and there were no signs prohibiting me from being there. They simply insisted the terminal was open only to workers and I had to leave. My ejection simply underlined the racialised nature of these spaces.

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