A magazine launch by MARG1N Magazine
Fri 2 May 2025, 7.30pm – 9.30pm
Annexe, Objectifs
Free admission (Please RSVP here)
Join us for the launch of MARG1N Magazine’s second issue: Traces. An annual Southeast Asian film magazine by writers, filmmakers, and artists, their second issue honors memories and gazes that drift through Singapore and Vietnam. Through essays, visual scripts, archives, and more, TRACES unearths the flotsam, jetsam, and derelict that churns throughout or beneath today’s cinematic currents.
Traces are fragmentary by nature. You can never deduce a comprehensive view from a trace. Traces gesture, shock, defy, and aspire toward a greater truth than their whole existence. In some way, a film is also a collection of traces, with the hope of invoking in its viewers a sense of wonder and resonance that makes us pause, perhaps rewatch, and rethink certain rigidities. The writings that we have worked with in this issue embody that generative power of traces.
The launch will include a screening of three short films, a panel discussion with the MARG1N team and some of the writers of issue 2 Tracey Toh, Sasha Han, Alex Lee, and TN Đan, followed by a DJ set by filmmaker Daniel Hui.
Films screened include
Artist Debbie Ding has been documenting survey markings and graffiti in Singapore. One particular set of graffiti catches her attention. Found in the back stairwell in Pearl Centre, Chinatown, the location of an R-rated cinema, now demolished, the anonymous drawer roughly sketches a man and a woman beside a series of three numbers. What does it all mean? She finds out.
As the journey starts, wide empty landscapes make one wonder what one is looking for. A mysterious object? A crime scene? Something horrifying? The scenes are getting more and more specific, but they do not lead to any concrete solution – only an injury in place of a metaphor.
Streaks of hair and colors weave together curiously and furiously, imploding into a frantic vision of a manic pull between exuberance and anxiety. The filmmakers created this film by gluing their hair to 16mm and Super 8 film leader spliced as loops that were played in overlay simultaneously on film projectors, and modified with ink during projection. A textural expression of an anxious feeling of being.
About MARG1N
MARG1N is an annual print-only Southeast Asian film magazine based in Cambodia, supported by Anti-Archive. We celebrate and bridge together regional writers, artists, and filmmakers through the lenses of Southeast Asian cinema under a different topic each year.