Project Description

This issue of VIRUS casts the spotlight on nostalgia, memories, stories, as well as the inherent imperfections they come with.

Through the cataloguing of the iconic Rochor Centre before its impending demolition, five photographers were each armed with only a disposable (perhaps somehow befitting to the theme) camera to capture its inner spaces and people.

A space with its own beauty and rawness, where abandoned furniture accompany communal, lively resting areas, something appearing to be unkempt and unsightly to one may perfectly embody the spirit of the space to another.

This issue of VIRUS is largely influenced by the grotesque. As Rémi Astruc suggests, hybridity is an important trope of the grotesque, which is used to conceptualise alterity and change. As such, colourful facades and well-polished appearances are eschewed in favour of seeking out the raw, gritty found in Rochor Centre, portraying another perspective that captures its beauty and significance in equal measure.

Seeking to subvert the traditional definition of beauty, this issue of VIRUS is characterised through its planned disorder and intentional imperfections. Through random illustrations, multiple photo collages, graphic illusions intended to dilate the reader’s eyes, and irregular page sizes in different signatures, VIRUS aims to evoke the raw and visceral nature of memories and emotions that often bleed into one another, leaving one inseparable from the other. These different, independent moments are etched deeply in our subconscious, but over time, merge together through similarities in time and space to form an amorphous, malleable product of memory.