Benang - The Thread at MALAM 2026

METAMO was proud to participate in the inaugural MALAM Projection Mapping competition as part of Singapore Night Festival 2026. Every storytelling tradition in Southeast Asia has been the same gesture, repeated with new tools: a surface, a light, and a mark. The kelir of the wayang stage, the printed poster on a kampong wall, the spray-painted mural, the projected light on a building façade, these are not separate inventions. They are one continuous practice, each generation reaching for the technologies of its moment to gather, remember, and imagine together.

"Benang" traces this continuum across 90 seconds on The Cathay, Singapore’s first cinema and a site that has held projected stories since 1939. The piece moves through six eras: the shadow puppet traditions of the region, mass-printed paper memory, projected graffiti and mural art, the pixel and screen era, and finally projection mapping itself revealed as the medium that can carry every previous tradition at once.

The work draws on Metamo’s collaborative history with Singapore’s street art community, including Light to Night 2025, positioning projection mapping not as an arrival from outside the lineage but as its natural continuation.