Before there was the map, the ground was not merely an undulating surface for scoring the architectural iron grid of urban planning. The 1836 Map of the Town and Environs of Singapore, drawn by French lithographer Jean-Baptiste (J. B.) Tassin and based on the survey of Singapore’s pioneering colonial architect and Superintendent of Public Works, George Drumgoole Coleman, represents one of the earliest instances of cartographical disciplining of the island-city’s landscape, and perhaps its ecological environs as well.

The artwork Fireflies constitutes a pair of backlit perforated drawings, or rather, re-drawings of the 1836 Map, to return a different imagination of the ground before there was the map. Contesting the map’s emphasis on comprehensive survey and engineering achievement, of gridded streets, cultivated hills, plantation grounds, and rechannelled rivers, the diptych instead zooms in to reveal other details and other grounds, obscured or erased by the map’s narrative of progress.

Through pricked surfaces and illuminated voids, the work reimagines the city centre’s dry, stable, and habitable ground as porous and unstable, saturated by monsoonal rains, flooded paddy fields, and mangrove marshes that once shifted with the tides of now-displaced rivers. The constellation-like points of light recall the fireflies of wet landscapes, often understood as messengers between worlds. In this reading, they mediate between living and ghostly realms, connecting the environmental crises of the present with submerged pasts and speculative futures.