Singapore, in its era of ‘adolescence’, presents the persistence of the Sacred amid the constant upheavals of land, pressuring the evolution of the socio-cultural milieu of its Singaporean Chinese communities. In its post-independence pursuit of stability, the state demanded adaptations to sacred life, most contentiously, within the domain of death rituals. Yet even as the machinery of modernisation advances under the state’s secular rationality, these rituals persist, not through continuity, but through their fragmented, subversive, and at times ‘absurd’ readaptations. Rather than total secularisation, the sacred evolves through inhabiting interstices between the regulated and the vernacular, the spiritual and the infrastructural. It infiltrates and entangles itself within the very secular infrastructures that inadvertently displace it, resisting total disenchantment through forms of spatial subversion and ritual evolution.

Highways of the Dead adopts this attitude of appropriation and re-adaptation to contest the atomisation of sacred land. Rather than seeking a return to traditional death practices, it embraces the emergent, syncretic cultures forming around death in contemporary Singapore. Centred on the Singaporean Chinese community, the project reimagines state infrastructures as a home for the dead. An insertion of ritual life into the very systems designed to regulate and inadvertently atomise it.

The proposition serves as both a reminder and a readaptation of past and present norms. It rejects the idea of revival, instead embracing the present as proof that the past persists in fragmentary ways. The reveal of how ongoing ritual appropriations provoke a reconsideration of infrastructure as a mere secular apparatus, suggesting that Singapore’s infrastructures may be viewed as cosmopoetic ritual artefacts. It questions the possibility of reconciliating the Sacred and the Profane by enchanting the very infrastructures that keep the machine of society rolling.