In the month since a bunch of people carried a house along Jalan Ipoh to KLPAC, heaps of images and video documenting the event has surfaced all over Facebook and the interwebs. Projek Angkat Rumah sorts through that mountain of material to give us an exclusive behind-the-scenes view of what it takes to move a house.

Enough time has passed for that ‘WOW SO COOOOOOL’ factor to wear off on me, and now I can’t help but wonder, WHAT DOES IT MEAN? It would be great at this point to find out how people (organizers, participants, on-lookers) interpret Projek Angkat Rumah.

For comparison, here’s what Francis Alys says about his 2002 project ‘When Faith Moves Mountains’: 

On April 11, 2002, five hundred volunteers were supplied with shovels and asked to form a single line at the foot of a giant sand dune in Ventanilla, an area outside Lima. This human comb pushed a certain quantity of sand a certain distance, thereby moving a sixteen-hundred-foot-long sand dune about four inches from its original position.

When Faith Moves Mountains is my attempt to de-romanticize Land art. When Richard Long made his walks in the Peruvian desert, he was pursuing a contemplative practice that distanced him from the immediate social context. When Robert Smithson built the Spiral Jetty on the Salt Lake in Utah, he was turning civil engineering into sculpture and vice versa. Here, we have attempted to create a kind of Land art for the land-less, and, with the help of hundreds of people and shovels, we created a social allegory. This story is not validated by any physical trace or addition to the landscape. We shall now leave the care of our story to oral tradition, as Plato says in the Republic. Only in its repetition and transmission is the work actualized. In this respect, art can never free itself from myth. Indeed, in modern no less than pre-modern societies, art operates precisely within the space of myth.

In this sense, myth is not about the veneration of ideals–of pagan gods or political ideology–but rather an active interpretive practice performed by the audience, who must give the work its meaning and its social value. After all, isn’t the story of modern and contemporary art and its cult of the object really just a myth of materialism, of matter as an ideal? For me, it is a refusal to acknowledge the transitory, a failure to see that art really exists, so to speak, in transit.

You can read more about that project here, and here. Or you could just look at Projek Angkat Rumah’s pretty peektures, but that would be boring…

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Production Meeting. (L-R) Liew Seng Tat (Creative Director), X-Factor, Penghulu Sesat Ears, June Tan (co-Producer), Douglas Wong (Field Marshall).

Building the house.

Seng Tat giving the finer points on how to lift a house to the rest of production, who is trying to look convinced. (L-R) Liew Seng Tat, Mark Teh (co-Producer), Shikin Lee (crew),  Baki Zainal (Field Marshall), Hasbeemasputra Abu Bakar (Field Marshall), June Tan.

Briefing for volunteers because, er, nobody had carried a house before.

Volunteers who came to test carry the house a few days before the event.  Despite the rain, they soldiered on till we got lift-up. See Nazim Esa’s video of the rehearsal here : http://tinyurl.com/3xatx4k

Highly efficient registration and organization of volunteers by the Da Huang and Pop-In gang, led by both Mark Teh and Fei (in picture).

Seng Tat, giving directions to the Chicken, who was part of the video team. See Part 1 of Zan Azlee’s video here: http://tiny.cc/z82j9

We like to think the traffic police got into the semangat of things also.

Volunteers listening intently to instructions from the Field Marshall before lift-off. Each team of volunteers carried the house every 20-30 meters before stopping to rest or changing teams.

Festive spirit in the parade was added with Mr Potato and 3 Mexican midgets.

The house being carried along Jalan Ipoh.

Detour into lorong since we could not cross the over-head bridge ahead.

Volunteers overcame every single obstacle including moving an abandoned bus which was illegally parked, and in our way.

Overhead wires immediately brought out the taller volunteers who instinctively became the galah.

Curious on-lookers.

Marching band uncles wearing our funny ears.

All Indian Lion Dance troupe made up of secondary school boys.

Kompang boys adding to the meriah

House being craned over the guardhouse at the entrance of KLPAC.

Along the way, we had many suggestions from the public (“opp..opp..opp”) . In this case, warning the volunteers as they navigated through trees and branches.

Turning into the final stretch and upon seeing Urbanscapes, jubilant volunteers broke out singing “Rasa Sayang” and “Balik Kampung”. See another break out of Rasa Saying here: http://tinyurl.com/363xmdj

After the house arrived at Urbanscapes, the decorators got into action (In picture – Wong Hoy Cheong)

The verandah of the house served as an open stage for anybody to perform. We prepared a karaoke set, which was rather popular.

From the house, Aunty Hary (Haryati Jaffar) leading the crowd in a pocho-pocho ‘marathon”.

Performances went into the night. (In picture – My Panda Head Curry)

(Photos by Gan Siong King, Liew Pik Horng and Chin Jee Yin)

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At Urbanscapes 2010 , award-winning filmmaker Liew Seng Tat, with the support of Five Arts Centre, Da Huang Pictures, Mamee and Carrefour, got more than 250 participants of different ages and backgrounds to carry a house from Jalan Ipoh to the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac). Against the backdrop of increasing crime rates, gated communities and fears for personal safety, this project proposes increased participation and engagement with our urban contexts and environments. Led by a lion dance troupe, kompang players and a marching band, the team displayed the spirit of gotong-royong, Hari Sukan, march-past parades as they overcame several obstacles along the way. Upon arriving at KLPac, the house’s verendah became an open stage for poetry reading, singing, karaoke, dancing, fire-breathing and a theremin performance. Through-out, there were also t-shirt printing and tikam-tikam games played.