If loss were a currency : Creative writing workshops & dialogue on loss, memory & place

If loss were a currency: writing loss, memory, and place

This workshop is part of HAN@Katong-Joo Chiat, presented by Katong Culture, Delere Press, and supported by the National Heritage Board, as part of Heritage Activation Nodes.

Workshop 1 – Making Marks
Date: 7 November 2026, 2pm to 4pm

What does it mean to leave a mark? And what might be lost — or found — in the act of making one?

This session begins with the idea of writing as mark-making. From some of our earliest forms of writing — marks scratched, carved, or drawn onto surfaces — to the words we write today, participants will consider writing as both an act of adding and taking away. While we often think of writing as placing something onto a surface, earlier forms of inscription also involved scratching into, and taking something out of, one.

Writing, then, might be thought of as doing both at once: leaving something behind while also making an absence.

Participants will take these ideas into the neighbourhood through a playful writing walk around Katong-Joo Chiat, responding to the marks, traces, surfaces, words, and details they encounter along the way. Through photographs and short pieces of writing, they will gather fragments that will become starting points for their own creative work.

Workshop 2 – On Remarks
Date: 5 December 2026, 2pm to 4pm

What happens when a mark becomes a remark? And what responsibilities come with saying something about a place?

Beginning with a collective reading of the opening stanza of a classic text, this session explores interpretation: how we read, what we notice, and the different meanings that can emerge from the same words. From there, participants will consider the relationship between reading and writing, and how making marks is always, in some sense, also a way of reading the world around us.

Returning to Katong-Joo Chiat, participants will reflect on how they have interpreted the places, encounters, and details they have experienced: what they might want to say about them, what they might choose not to say, and to whom they might be speaking. The session introduces the question of responsibility into storytelling — not only what stories we tell, but why, how, and for whom we tell them.

Participants will then explore the forms their responses might take — from an essay or poem to a photograph, sequence of images, or film — considering how the form we choose shapes what can be said.

The session will conclude with an informal pop-up sharing of participants’ work and ideas, opening up a conversation around the different readings, responses, and stories that can emerge from encountering the same place.

Works you create and your pariticpation at the workshops will also be featured as part of the Lost, Found & Everything In-Between exhibition in 2027.

Requirements: participants need to bring their own smartphones or digital cameras. You will upload photo taken to accompany your writing. Please do arrive 10 minutes before the workshop starts and bring along a notebook and pen (physical or digital) to write down your ideas and thoughts during the workshop.

About Loss, found & every in-between programme

Join us a season of lost, found & everything in-between: a journey with walking tours, creative-writing and photozine workshops, games, an Open Call, community activities, and much more. This is not a typical heritage documentary programme. Rather than offering history as something already settled, we invite you to encounter the neighbourhood for yourself: to see what you see, what you don’t see, and to feel for what might be left in-between.

Become a story teller yourself.
Follow us on @katongculture for more updates on upcoming programmes, including a chance to be a storyteller yourself!

your participated works will be part of the exhibition of the same theme in 2027.

ABOUT THE FACILITATOR

Jeremy Fernando is a writer whose work moves between literature, philosophy, art, and media; and is concerned with the possibilities of reading and writing — with how we read the world, and what it might mean to respond to it. Across more than thirty books, his writing moves between essay, fiction, theory, and other forms, often allowing the boundaries between them to blur. He is also the editor at and co-founder of Delere Press, an independent publishing house established in 2011 as a space in which visual and written texts converse on equal footing; curates the thematic magazine One Imperative; and serves as the Jean Baudrillard Fellow at The European Graduate School.

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