Microattol at Tanjong Rimau, Sentosa, Singapore. Courtesy of Zarina Muhammad.
Notes on a Restless Shore: On Staying with Zombie Corals
How might we rethink environmental histories if we extend our attention beyond human-centred narratives, and acknowledge tides, corals, sediments, and other-than-human forces as active participants in the making of worlds? In the ways they inscribe change slowly and witness so much across time at the intertidal edge.
I first encountered coral microatolls along the southern shores of Singapore. At a glance, these low, circular formations embedded within the intertidal zones of places like Tanjong Rimau and Pulau Sekijang Pelepah (Lazarus Island) can appear unassuming, even lifeless. I began, somewhat affectionately, to call them “zombie corals”, sensing, even before I learnt their other names, that they were beings caught between states, shaped by both growth and interruption.
Microatolls grow laterally, their upward expansion constrained by the fluctuating levels of the sea. When exposed during low tides, their growth halts; when submerged again, they continue. Over time, their surfaces hold the trace of these oscillating shifts. Their forms offering quiet, physical records of environmental change. I’ve long been drawn to forms like this -matter and beings that remain hidden in plain sight, easily overlooked until you learn how to look differently. For scientists, they function as indicators of sea-level variation and tectonic movement. But to encounter them in situ also offered this sense that they exceed their role as just data points. You can almost read the tides across the irregular surfaces of their coral colonies, in the quiet ways they offer us glimpses of timescales, climate and weather patterns.
My connection with coral microatolls emerges from a sustained practice of working along the southern shorelines of Singapore, particularly Tanjong Rimau, in relation to the wider archipelagic formations of Pulau Sekijang Bendera (St John’s Island), Pulau Sekijang Pelepah (Lazarus Island), and Terumbu Pandan (Cyrene Reef). Within this terrain shaped by colonial histories, infrastructural transformation, and ongoing processes of ecological precarity, microatolls offer a way of reading the environment as both archive and interlocutor. They register environmental change across extended temporal scales, but they also invite forms of attention that are durational, embodied, and relational. To spend time with them is to be drawn into a different rhythm of knowing, one that unfolds through proximity, repetition, and attunement. It becomes less about a quantifiable extracting of knowledge and more about staying with something, again and again, until it starts to shift how you see.
This tension between measurement and other ways of knowing sits at the core of my practice. Working within these restless topographies invites a different kind of methodology - one that is sensorial, partial, and collaborative. This practice lingers largely in friction, opacity, and reverberation. It asks what it means to approach the earth not as resource, but as a guiding companion and to ask what is possible when we allow humility to interrupt our habits of knowing and making?
This inquiry was a running thread that extended into my installation and moving image work, Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau, presented as part of Lonely Vectors at the Singapore Art Museum in 2022. My first encounter with Tanjong Rimau was in 2021, during an intertidal walk that revealed the site not only as a physical landscape, but as a threshold space dense with histories, presences, and quiet inscriptions of change.
The work came out of wanting to stay with that feeling. To be in conversation with a site that holds archives of ecological loss, erasure, and what continues to linger.
It feels significant, that through the STAR Residencies, I found myself returning to Tanjong Rimau, this time in dialogue with scientists studying coral microatolls identified along its shores. What began as an intuitive, affective encounter unfolded into a different layer of knowing, where scientific observation and embodied sensing began to converge. This return did not feel coincidental, but rather like a continuation and an unfolding of the site’s own insistence.
Tanjong Rimau is a site marked by layered histories of passage and rupture. Situated at the southern tip of the mainland, where it meets the northwestern edge of Sentosa, it forms the entrance to the Old Straits of Singapore, an ancient maritime gateway known to sea travellers for centuries. The rocky shores and caves of the island’s last remaining coastal cliffs emerge only at low tide, appearing for a few short hours before the sea swallows them back in. Batu Berlayar, or Dragon Tooth’s Gate, once stood here as a navigational marker, until its destruction in 1848 by the British as part of a broader colonial reshaping of the island- one that levelled hills, redirected rivers, and transformed coastlines through extraction and reclamation. These histories remain sedimented within the site, even when not immediately visible. Today, the identification of microatolls here introduces another layer, bringing scientific observation into dialogue with these longer, unsettled histories of the shore.
Across these interconnected sites, whether the intertidal expanses of Cyrene Reef or the island ecologies of Pulau Sekijang Bendera, Pulau Sekijang Pelepah, Pulau Ujong, to desire to know the landscape here defies a singular narrow pathway and emerges through histories of movement, migration, multiple knowledge systems and cosmological imagination. Across these potent landscapes, land and sea ought to be understood as animate, relational, and continuously in flux. Microatolls sit within this expanded field, making visible deep temporalities of environmental change while also pointing to the limits of human perception. Working with these “zombie corals” opens an invitation to remain with forms of life that register the world differently- to attend to slow inscriptions, partial knowledge, and more-than-human agencies held in tension.
It asks not only what we can know, but how we choose to be in relation with what we do not yet understand and might become perceptible when we allow the whole body to listen.
