Through memory, digressions, and echoes of literature and history, The Lamplighter gathers fragments of a vanished past in an analogical manner inspired by Enzo Melandri’s La Linea e il Circolo, retold through the solitary ritual of a man lighting lamps at dusk. No One Lit the Lamp turns inward: within the home, the glow reveals both the intimacies of domestic life between neighbours and the stains that remain under its light.

At its heart lies the story of a Baghdadi Jewish man in 1930s Singapore. His recollections ripple across time: fleeting encounters with Japanese neighbours before the war, meditations on exile and belonging, and reflections on the fragile thresholds between shadow and light, between walls and the lives divided by them—on the eve of a world soon to be torn apart by war.

The building in which this story unfolds is the very one that now houses The Private Museum, where the work is exhibited