Events

Jointly organised by Asian Urbanisms, and Science Technology and Society clusters at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Tim Bunnell, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Overcast is a short film set in Forest City, a near-abandoned eco-smart development built on reclaimed land in the Johor Strait, Malaysia. Once promoted through glossy architectural renderings as a model of sustainable, high-tech urban living, the city now exists in a state of suspension—neither fully realized nor entirely obsolete. The film dwells in this condition, tracing the disjuncture between the promise of an eco-smart future and its material afterlife: vacant plots, collapsed streets, and empty high-rises. As the camera drifts along eroding beaches and underused infrastructures, it foregrounds the unintended habitats that have emerged in the project’s wake. Mangrove seedlings occupy the shallow coastal zone; birds gather around a swamp formed through failed construction; fishers and partygoers move through spaces never meant for them, subtly reworking the city through practices of inhabitation and care. By attending to these fragile and fleeting presences, Overcast reflects on forms of belonging that persist within a landscape held in abeyance, where ecological processes, speculative futures, and everyday life remain in tension. The title of the film gestures to this uncertainty, referring both to an overly optimistic financial forecast and to the diffused light of a clouded sky, in which clarity is deferred and outcomes remain unresolved.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michaela Büsse is an interdisciplinary researcher and postdoctoral fellow at Dresden University of Technology. Her work examines environmental speculation and emerging material and territorial configurations in the context of planetary urbanization and the climate crisis. Drawing on visual ethnography and field-based research, she investigates how future imaginaries are materialized—and often unsettled—through material, ecological, and technological interventions. Büsse’s work has been presented internationally across academic, artistic, and curatorial contexts. Her latest solo exhibition, Vacant Futures: Architectures of Desire and Abandonment, was presented at VI PER Gallery, Prague, in 2025 and coincided with the launch of the edited volume Granular Configurations: Sand, Materiality, and Planetary Urbanization (K. Verlag).