Not an Island by João Tamura
Like ourselves, who require each other, there are places that require other places to exist.
Singapore, post-landing, is moisture that penetrates the body, almost suffocating. Skins touch and on them a thin layer of water – merging with heat.
Singapore is crowded underground carriages, with people as different from each other as the tongues and dialects in the air which echo. The carriage that transports us, sways us. I embrace her as our bodies cool under the air-conditioning – the same thing that separates us from the heat that fills the avenues, the rooms, the grocery stores, the markets, the temples.
We wake up with echoes of a prayer – murmurs that come to us from a nearby temple. The endless streets and Singapore is the smell of fresh fruit in Chinatown, or the aroma of incense, at dawn, before sunrise, in the streets of Little India. It is an eternal quasi-summer – sea baths and salty skin. We fell asleep on the sand, under cloudy skies. When we wake up, a train takes us home. The night welcomes us with neon lights that bathe our face, our arms, our hands. It invites us to fall: we eat and drink, we wander until we lose ourselves, until any bus forces us to return and take us to the place from which we started.
We, who always return to the house from which we left, are like Singapore: we need other places to exist, otherwise we are nothing.
João Tamura is a film photographer and musician from Lisboa, Portugal