Vel Vel

Vel Vel: Visual and Sound Cultures of Thaipusam in Singapore offers an immersive exploration of the craft, music, and lived practices surrounding one of Singapore’s most distinctive cultural festivals. At its centre is the kavadi practice, the elaborate ceremony of carrying offerings in honour of the Hindu deity Murugan. Drawing on five years of interdisciplinary research and close collaboration with the community members who participate in the procession, Vel Vel traces how kavadi are imagined, made, carried, and accompanied by music, revealing a rich body of artistic and cultural knowledge transmitted and reinterpreted across generations.

Combining original photography and detailed illustrations with visual mapping, field recordings, interviews, archival research, and documentation of kavadi structures, the book approaches Thaipusam as both visual and sonic culture. Conversations with makers, bearers, piercers, and musicians illuminate the skills, stories, creative processes, and embodied knowledge behind the procession. Bringing together design research, ethnography, and community knowledge, Vel Vel also examines how the procession transforms public space, temporarily creating a sacred corridor through Singapore’s contemporary urban landscape. It presents Thaipusam as a dynamic form of intangible cultural heritage, where ritual, community, and city intersect, and a living tradition that continues to evolve while sustaining and reshaping Tamil Hindu diasporic culture, memory, and identity.