Aveline Ang Swee Leng (Tomato)

What We Hold Between Us is an inquiry into how relationships are sustained within community life through everyday interactions.

The project started with an interest in what motivates people to give continuously—not just once, but ongoing acts of returning, contributing and caring. Through observation, this persistence appears to be driven not by obligation alone, but through small, repeated actions that shape how people feel seen, remembered and connected.

These everyday interactions are understood as relational acts, including greeting, sharing, helping or paying attention to one another. While they may appear ordinary, these actions play an important role in sustaining social relationships, and build trust and reciprocity within a community over time.

These acts do more than express care—they also carry and circulate gratitude. When care is recognised, it is often reciprocated, and through this exchange, gratitude moves between people. In this way, gratitude is not only a feeling, but something practised through action and is embedded within everyday life.

The project engaged community members through photovoice, a participatory approach that invites participants to document moments from their own lived experiences. Rather than defining what care or community should look like, the project centres on what participants themselves notice in routines, relationships and ordinary encounters. Photographs, paired with personal narratives, reveal how meaning is formed through lived experience rather than imposed interpretation.

Through this process, the project suggests that communities are sustained through repeated relational acts, where care and gratitude are continuously expressed. These ordinary moments, often overlooked, contribute to a shared sense of belonging and continuity within community life.

Across these stories, gratitude shifts across moments and relationships rather than a fixed state, taking different forms depending on how people notice and respond to one another. What emerges is not a single definition of gratitude, but a pattern of how people attend to, respond to and hold one another in community.

What We Hold Between Us refers to these relational moments that are held between people over time. It asks: if these acts were no longer present, how would a community feel like?

Have a read here.