“Ugliness and horror are important, because they compel our compassionate  coexistence to go beyond condescending pity.”
– Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought

The Romanticist view of ‘Nature’ dichotomizes nature and culture in ways exploited by capitalist ideology in the form of simplistic environmentalism. Taking on Timothy Morton’s ideas on a need for a new form of eco-critique, the project is about how a built proposition (specifically, artificial caves for swiftlet nest farming) and various localized phenomena on site can come together to generate an alternative economy in Singapore’s hedonistic tourist getaway, Sentosa Island. It is a critique of the Sentosa’s materialist culture that does not attempt to revert back to its nostalgic tranquility but rather by suggesting a hypernatural (i.e, blurring the boundary between nature and culture) alternative. Its ambition is to transform and counter its current narrow consumer culture & environmentalist’s view on nature.

The project is thus about proposing an alternative economy in Sentosa in which we truthfully admit to our sins and co-exist with our toxicity. It is about destroying the dichotomy between nature and culture and expressing the interconnected  relationships between phenomena as a better form of eco-critique.