You can change your hair, your phone number, and your address, but your body still holds onto the people you used to be. Your internal archive doesn’t just collect dust; it saves who you were when you were still figuring things out, learning who to trust, and trying to find your footing. Do you ever feel those old chapters waking up inside you, wondering when you might need to look back at them again?
Revisiting the tracks
Audrey Desmond (Marketing Lead)
Our lives are a moving timeline of shifting habits, changing lifestyles, and the people we cross paths with along the way. Some connections last a lifetime, while others are only meant for a season—a natural ebb and flow I’ve come to accept as a vital part of my journey. Much like the vinyl record in the accompanying film, we simply carry every distinct era of our history (and future ;)) within us.
If I could go back in time to alter how things played out, I honestly wouldn’t, because those exact uncertainties are what moulded me into who I am today. Even so, I might sometimes wish I could live through those chapters again with the insight I now possess. Ultimately, I just want to look back at the archives of my past with total peace—honouring the journey it took to get here, and gently letting go of what unsettles.
Updates & Drafts
Charlene Lim (Admin Executive)
The first thing this brings to mind is, oddly, a Hannah Montana song: “You’ll Always Find Your Way Back Home.” Shamefully enough, I’ve never watched the show, but Disney songwriting has a way of landing even without context.
The lyric that resonates most is the idea that you can change your style, chase new dreams, laugh, cry, become someone different on the outside — but you’ll still find your way back home, back to who you are. So simple, almost childish, but true.
Through every season we move through, we keep returning to our roots, our values, the experiences that shaped us. Our exterior is just a presentation, a costume that shifts with mood, trend, or moment. Underneath, though, we’re always keeping a living record of every version of ourselves, updating without erasing. Not reinvention, really. Just one continuous person, still being written. Each version layered onto the last, drafts and all.
Hannah Montana: The Movie Soundtrack Album Cover
By: Hannah Montana
Producer: Matthew Gerrard
A Broken Facade
Shri Meenakshi Dhanashekar (Marketing and Communications Intern)
We often tend to think that becoming someone new means leaving old versions of ourselves behind. We change so many things about ourselves because we are used to thinking that growth means starting over, thinking that if we bury our shattered old versions we will become better individuals. However, in reality, growth is all about accumulation. Who you were yesterday, shapes who you are today and who you become tomorrow.
Every experience, every interaction, every hardship, leaves an imprint on the way we function. They don’t simply disappear because time has passed, they grow deeper and deeper into us as time passes. A familiar place that your mind has forgotten, your body will remember. Your chest will tighten when you walk through corridors that you once laughed in, before your mind even realizes why.
Looking back or reflecting should never be about trying to fix or forget the past. It should be about being grateful and thankful to each and every version of ourselves that shaped us, whether easy or hard, into the individuals we are.
Stefan Gunnesch’s, “Hidden Identities” becomes a visual metaphor for the self. The faces have been partially concealed, rather than erased. This view communicates the narrative that our identities are built through layers instead of just being replacements. Fragments of earlier visions continue to stay visible underneath, similarly, our older selves continue to exist under the identities we present so proudly today.
Hidden identities by stefan gunnesch
https://trendland.com/hidden-identities-by-stefan-gunnesch/
Little traces of travel
Ricky Sim (Artistic Director)
Whenever I travel, I realise that memory often begins quietly. It may not come as a complete story, but as a small sensation: the warmth of a street at dusk, the colour of a doorway, the taste of something unfamiliar, or the pace of people moving through a city.
These moments stay with me in simple ways. They become small dots in my internal archive, each one carrying a trace of where I have been and how I was feeling at that time. Over the years, I begin to see how these dots connect across places, encounters, pauses and small discoveries, slowly shaping how I understand the world.
Travelling opens my senses to life beyond what I already know. It teaches me to notice, to slow down and to appreciate how each place has its own rhythm. In a way, every journey becomes part of a larger mind map, not only of the world I have moved through, but of the life that continues to unfold within me.
Perhaps this is how travel stays with me, not as a checklist of places, but as little traces that continue to connect long after I have returned home.
Photo credit: Ricky Sim
Dance of the machine
Matthew Goh (Company Dancer)
Artificial Intelligence can generate quirky and weird content that sometimes disrupts conventional norms and stereotypes. But how far can the unconventional be pushed before we perceive it as strange or awful? As we watch this ‘ballet,’ could we ponder whether this is still the classical form we know, or maybe it is the avant-garde counterpart—contemporary dance—or if it is even dance?
Faint Lines, Lingering Light
Esther Ong (Company Manager)
What remains is not the path itself, but the feeling of it. A subtle shift in how space might be entered, how attention might be held. Long after it is gone, the impression persists, soft, unresolved and difficult to name.
This is how Hideo Kobayashi’s photographic works linger in my memory. The light in his work does not follow a predictable path. It bends and drifts around what it meets. Watching it, the world feels slightly altered, as if the space itself remembers the line that once passed through. It leaves no fixed route, yet it edges quietly into perception, shaping how we move, notice and hold a moment in mind.
I notice my own traces in the spaces I pass through: the glow that lingers on pavement after a streetlight flickers off in my neighbourhood, the brief reflection along a windowpane, the way sunlight shifts quietly across a clearing. These fleeting marks may never form a road, yet they linger in subtle ways, shaping the landscapes around me and the moments I touch without knowing.
“Interrupted Place/trace” Emon Photo Gallery, Tokyo Filming “Streetlight”
Transforming Disruption
Ricky Sim (Artistic Director)
A major disagreement, a change in priorities, or even a life event can throw a relationship off balance. It’s never easy. But I’ve come to see that disruption, as painful as it is, often leads to growth. These moments force us to face what we’ve been avoiding—our insecurities, needs, or unresolved issues. I’ve found that disruption can spark deeper conversations and bring about real change. In the end, it often makes the connection more honest and meaningful.