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LANDING IN


                 -90                -60               -30                0                  30                60                  90                    
: FIRST DAY COVER for KARYA SENI ARCA AWAM - 2021
: THE CONTRADICTIONS OF POSTCOLONIAL STATEHOOD
: RECLAIMING NOISE, LINEARLY
: AT THE DAWN OF A NEW MILLENNIUM, OUR SPAN OF CONTROL IS ALMOST LIMITLESS
: MALAYA-1
: MEGA 2020
: THE (UP)ENDING OF THE DIGITAL WORLD: WAWASAN 2020 AND THE MILLENNIUM BUG
: THE ARCHIVE



    
A.H    SENSIBLE ︎ The imaginary horizon which both surrounds and passes through the Observer's eye.

 
      
G.H   The horizon which touches the Earth at the Observer's position.





MEGAPROSTHESIS ▪︎ CHIN KAR YERN

Mahathir once described that the petronas twin towers is to malaysia, what a stool is to a short man
       
    
C.H   RATIONAL ︎ The plane which passes through the centre of the Earth.



           
    
G.H   LOCAL ︎ The visible boundary between Earth and sky, notable intrusions such as trees, mountains, and buildings.





        
G.H   APPARENT ︎ The apparent boundary between Earth and sky, a distant line with no intrusions.

        
   


   


Wawasan 2020 was Malaysia’s horizon. Announced in 1991 by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, it served as a prescription for a young nation caught in the rancour of its teenage years. Wawasan 2020, like other promises of development in Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, was the vehicle to bring Malaysia into the future – it promised to deliver a mature, unified, developed, and prosperous nation by the year 2020.


Wawasan 2020 was the culmination of Mahathir’s policies – the New Economic Policy for a just economics, the Look East policy in Asian excellence – with the added sparkle of the new ideology of Bangsa Malaysia. To this end, Wawasan 2020 was translated to the masses – children sang songs and made drawings, artists were mobilised to picture the future, stores were named in its honour. In concrete, Wawasan 2020 also left its footprint in infrastructure and transport. In the more fanciful (yet, also, totally serious) versions of this development fever, by 2020, Malaysia would have a highway leading to the rest of the Asian land continent, communication satellites, submarine fibre-optic cables and even flying cars. It would be the centre of a new world, defined by its connection to everywhere else.


After 2020, why Wawasan 2020, yet again? The cultural products of Wawasan 2020 have been spun to exhaustion, what is there left to say?


Let us instead consider Wawasan 2020 as representation. Wawasan 2020 is – to borrow the phrase from architectural historian Reinhold Martin – a cipher, “encod[ing] a virtual universe of production and consumption, as well as a material unit, a piece of the universe that helps to keep it going.” It both is, and represents, the new. It matters insofar as it is able to stand in for a bevvy of contradictory ideas in the hopes of capturing significance, including the adjective word-soup of its description, the leftist ideals, the neo-liberal realities. The Vision is both the vehicle and its movement, but also, it doesn’t really matter.


If we read Wawasan 2020 as cipher and as representation, then we must read Wawasan 2020 as laden with a call to form. Beyond marking epochal futurity and new temporalities, it took on solid mediums to circulate and exist in the world. We see this in the proliferation of speeches, seminars, websites, books, art, architecture, infrastructure etc; the list does not end. In some ways, to exist in relation to Malaysia in the 1990s to 2000s was to exist in relation to Wawasan 2020, whether through allusion, explicit citation or even denial. To understand the stakes of Wawasan 2020, we must simultaneously acknowledge its relation to the state and decontextualise its state-centeredness. We must reject the monolith, and instead pluralise the ways of visioning the utopic plan offered.


It is with this provocation that we invite you to participate in wawasan.directory: a project to reimagine the possibilities and potentialities of Wawasan 2020 and make disciplinary and formal agendas anew. wawasan.directory brings together artists, architects, designers, musicians and writers to create speculative histories and alternative futures. To tell a story of Wawasan 2020 is to engage in disjuncture, anachronism and lateness. Between fiction and fact, we occupy the space of conjecture, opinion and memory: this is the tide of the Wawasan dream.