The Borrowed City

Every Sunday morning in Singapore, something shifts. The city has a population of approximately 270,000 foreign domestic workers – mostly from The Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar and South Asia. These women maintain its homes, raise its children, and care for its elderly. They have one mandated day off per week — Sunday. On Sunday mornings, the margins of the city briefly change hands. Workers gather in the underpasses beneath expressways, in the shadows of towers, on the concrete floors of spaces not designed for human rest. They call home across thousands of miles. They share food. They sit with each other in the unhurried way that the rest of the week does not allow. This photograph was made on a Sunday morning in the walkway beneath the elevated expressways of Marina Bay — in the shadow of Singapore's central business district — a space built for transit rather than habitation. Two women sit on the ground, their phones connecting them to lives lived elsewhere, beneath concrete forms that dwarf them absolutely. Above them, the soaring geometry of infrastructure built in part by migrant hands frames the skyline they serve, but do not belong to. The city does not see them. The camera does. They remain, as always, at the bottom of the frame.