I will be a Stranger-in-Resident with Stranger Conversations for a six-month Kristang Indigenous cultural revitalisation residency with substantial public engagement from Monday, 23 June 2025 to Monday, 11 November 2025. Two proposed titles of my residency are "Ultramar: A Glimpse of the Kristang Sea" or "Ultramar: The Dreaming Kristang Archipelago". These refer to how I am known as the Kabesa Ultramar, or the Archeopelagic Kabesa, for being the leader of the community who excavated and concretised so much of the Unsaid and occluded ways of being in Kristang, concealed within the collective unconscious which we call Krismatra or the Dreaming Ocean, and who singlehandedly not only brought the entire Kristang community back from the dead, but out of the sea, allowing us to be honoured and recognised for the truly unique and one-of-a-kind Creole/Indigenous people that we are and have always been. In addition to its default associations with undestroyable strength, unsurpassable fearlessness, revitalisation and reclamation, Ultramar can also separately index the muscular, confident, brave and very, very masculine, tender and fierce approach to queerness and/or non-heterosexual sexuality and/or non-cisgender gender expression in Kristang which I embody, and was originally the Portuguese word used to refer to the Portuguese Empire's overseas colonies, such as Melaka where the Kristang community began its existence out of intermarriage, concubinage, slavery and rape between arriving Portuguese colonisers and local Malay residents in Melaka and Singapore in the 16th century.

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The residency consists of eleven workshops and activations that will be open to the public, ticketed at a low cost, and hosted by Stranger Conversations at 195PHT | Pearl's Hill Terrace. Pearl's Hill Terrace is located behind People's Park Complex and adjacent to Chinatown MRT; older Kristang people will recognise this building as the old Upper Barracks and Pearl's Hill Police Operational Headquarters. Two workshops or activations will be held every month on Monday evenings between July and November, following the first workshop or activation on Monday, 23 June 2025. The workshops or activations will focus on introducing the public to the two primary Kristang Indigenous processes of sunyeskah or dreamfishing and sunyaxah or dreamshining, to using these to growing and deepening connections between the Kristang community, the Stranger Conversations community and the public, and to empower the public to be able to make use of Kristang Indigenous methods for their own mental health and well-being such that the dignity and esteem of the Kristang community is also restored in the public sphere as a result of this showcasing of the concrete utility and value of our culture and practices to others. I will be the primary Resident for the proposed residency, but am very open to input and interest from the six other Ka-Kabesa in the Kabesa leadership heptad and all Kapitang and Xamang-Krismatrang who wish to co-conduct any sessions based on your own particular interests and focuses. Because the events are ticketed and I will be the sole recipient of all profit from the events, I am willing to split any revenue from the events with any co-hosts. Please contact me if you wish to co-host a session with me. I describe the proposed formats for the dreamfishing and dreamshining sessions below.

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dreamfishing sessions

Dreamfishing is a Creole-Indigenous process unique to and originating from the Kristang culture that allows for the conscious, intentional and deliberate creation through creolisation of new Kristang words, concepts, structures and systems, and/or the unocclusion, naming and/or revelation of hidden components, relationships, energies and/or forces in reality, including information about the hidden past or anticipatable future. These are excavated during dreamfishing from the Dreaming Ocean of the entire living planet, which is called Gaia in Kristang, and from that of the entire living universe, which is called Otiosos in Kristang. Dreamfishing is a primary focus of the Kristang language revitalisation effort because many domains of Kristang life are still lacking in words and concepts, and/or have words and concepts that have not been documented or consolidated; since 2023, it has also been recognised worldwide as an Indigenous futures method usable by all people regardless of whether they are Kristang or not that can be used to process severe trauma, and to stochastically and rationally understand elements of one's own future psychoemotional development and that of the planet. For the dreamfishing Residency activations, I would like to use these as means of engaging both the Kristang community internally, and of engaging other communities with the Kristang community externally, with a particular focus on using the process of creolisation within dreamfishing to support one's mental health in daily life, or one's own decolonisation and reindigenisation and restoration of one's relationship to Gaia and the living universe. Such sessions will be themed around a particular domain of life that needs words (e.g. household actions, feelings, sports, space, etc.) and will always overtly or covertly contain an element of processing one's own personal, collective or intergenerational trauma through creolisation and Indigenous processes that will also be simultaneously supported by my own formal Western training as a therapy practitioner.

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tentative dreamfishing session dates​

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I have tentatively selected the following five workshop or activation slots for dreamfishing-related activities or sessions, and am very open to input and interest in co-conducting from Ka-Kabesa, Kapitang and Xamang-Krismatrang before I proceed to decide on specific topics. Please contact me if you wish to co-host a session with me.​

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(1) Monday, 7 July 2025 (7.30-9.30pm)
(2) Monday, 4 August 2025 (7.30-9.30pm)
(3) Monday, 1 September 2025 (7.30-9.30pm)

(4) Monday, 6 October 2025 (7.30-9.30pm)

(5) Monday, 3 November 2025 (7.30-9.30pm)

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All sessions will be open to the public and will involve dreamfishing in Kristang, in English and (whereever possible) in participants' other mother tongues and/or heritage languages.​

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dreamshining sessions

Dreamshining is a Creole-Indigenous form of performance art where the body itself is treated as a sacred, sanctified canvas or art space for the reification, manifestation, personification or embodiment of ideas, symbols, concepts, energies and/or relationships. In my particular case, I specialise in the Creole-Indigenous embodiment of paradoxes, healthy approaches to queer sexuality, nakedness, vulnerability, authenticity, healthy playfulness, healthy body positivity and the obliteration of body-related trauma, taking healthy and reasonable pride in one's (gay) attractiveness, sensuality and beauty. As Singapore's most-well known living Kristang and Eurasian writer and a major literary figure accepted as part of the SingLit canon but on poor terms with the state and most of the other SingLit writers, most of my dreamshining takes the form of poems linked with tableau near-naked (me in underwear or with me holding an object over or covering my genitals) or fully naked pictures of my body that together are intended to stimulate metacognitive thinking and stereotype deconstruction about gay people, brown people, Indigeneity, homophobia and racism, and masculinity, and to showcase creole-Indigenous Kristang perspectives on the body, on trauma, and on physicality and desire and how these can be healthily expressed. I know I myself and the Kristang community in general are very widely covertly accepted for our own radical championing of queerness, neurodivergence, body positivity and the visible processing of trauma since 2022; with the full support of the Kristang community, I am seeking to help others to begin to understand how to work on this radical acceptance for themselves.

Hence, for the dreamshining residency excavations, these will take the form of six dreamshining workshops primarily focused on the writing of poetry (but also open to other text types) organised around extremely spicy and sensitive but also emergently publicly accepted themes that only Kevin Martens Wong Zhi Qiang could facilitate in safe and comfortable fashion: for example, queerness, the body and physicality, trauma and neurodivergence are themes that I would definitely love to facilitate workshops around. In each session, I will teach the principles of dreamshining (mostly about reinterpreting or reframing how one engages with one's body and oneself through creolisation) and then have participants apply these through their poetry in ways that participants feel comfortable to do (e.g. using the space or the area around the space to take photos and to use these as starting points for their dreamshining poetry). 

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tentative dreamshining session dates

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I have tentatively selected the following six workshop or activation slots for dreamshining-related activities or sessions, and am very open to input and interest in co-conducting from Ka-Kabesa, Kapitang and Xamang-Krismatrang before I proceed to decide on specific topics for the second to sixth sessions. Please contact me if you wish to co-host a session with me.

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(1) Monday, 23 June 2025 (7.30-9.30pm)

Intro to Kristang Poetry, Prose and Art​

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(2) Sunday, 27 July 2025 (time tbc)
(3) Monday, 11 August 2025 (7.30-9.30pm)
(4) Monday, 8 September 2025 (7.30-9.30pm)

(5) Monday, 13 October 2025 (7.30-9.30pm)

(6) Monday, 10 November 2025 (7.30-9.30pm)

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All sessions will be open to the public and will involve dreamshining in English as the primary teaching/workshop medium, with dreamshining in Kristang and/or (whereever possible) in participants' other mother tongues and/or heritage languages possible with specific activities within the workshop or activation.

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Hosting space collaterals

Beyond the two forms of activation, I will put up small maps or charts in Kristang within Stranger Conversations featuring Singapore's MRT system in Kristang, the periodic table in Kristang, how the psyche is organised in Kristang etc. to create curiosity about Kristang in the hosting space that awareness of Kristang as a rational and very metaphysically advanced culture becomes more widespread, challenging stereotypes that creole and Indigenous communities have no culture of their own and are backward, primitive and lacking in a future orientation or present relevance of any kind, and providing concrete touching-off points for the "glimpse of the sea" mentioned in the activation title. I will also provide copies of our Bista di Kristang, Katra Pakau Diseides and Katrakarnansa dreamfishing cards, Kristang dreamfishing guide and Ila-Ila di Sul board game for the Strangers community to make use of within the space.