For the people who keep Singapore’s arts scene moving, care can be difficult to separate from the work itself. It can mean managing workloads and expectations, navigating difficult conversations, making space for different needs, or simply recognising when a person or team has reached their limits. These questions are at the centre of CITRUS fest 2026: Kacang Puteh, Care-Oke?, the second edition of the ten-day festival by ground-up collective CITRUS practices, taking place from 21 to 30 August at 42 Waterloo Street in conjunction with the Singapore Night Festival. Commissioned by the National Arts Council’s Arts Resource Hub, the festival brings together more than 50 arts workers across 20 programmes to consider what it might look like to make care a more visible and collective part of working in the arts.

Rather than approaching care as an individual responsibility, something each arts worker has to figure out for themselves, CITRUS fest looks at the structures, relationships and everyday practices that can help make creative work more sustainable. Its programme spans workshops, conversations, communal meals, installations and informal gatherings, bringing different roles and perspectives into the same space. We spoke to festival curator Chong Gua Khee about how her understanding of care has evolved since the festival’s first edition in 2024, why care needs to be shared rather than carried alone, and what she hopes these conversations might change within Singapore’s arts ecosystem. Read the interview in full below:

Bakchormeeboy: The festival centres on “care”, which feels like a buzzword thrown around a lot but rarely unpacked. What does care mean to you personally, and how has your understanding of it evolved since the first CITRUS fest in 2024?

Chong Gua Khee: Personally, I still return to the definition of care that CITRUS practices drew on for our Library of Care initiative in 2021 – that it is “a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world, encompassing our bodies, selves, and environment” (Fisher & Tronto, 1990). 

For me, that means two things. Firstly, care is not just a ‘good to have’, but something fundamental to living well. Secondly, care goes beyond just ‘being nice to one another’- it can look like gentleness, but as we practice it at CITRUS, care can also mean being firm, setting clear boundaries, being mindful of information overload, and constant communication about what work needs to be done and what is the team’s current capacity.

Bakchormeeboy: This year’s theme suggests that care is something shared rather than carried alone. Was there a particular moment or experience in Singapore’s arts scene that inspired this direction for the festival?

Gua Khee: This direction came from an accumulation of moments rather than one specific incident. Across CITRUS programmes over the past few years, we often heard arts workers describe their feeling that the responsibility of caring for everyone in a project sat on their shoulders alone, and the sense that they therefore could not pause and rest. 

This is why the upcoming edition of CITRUS fest emphasises care as a shared practice and responsibility. The labour of care can become lighter and more joyful when it is distributed across a group, as compared to a single person trying to be mindful of everyone’s wellbeing. At the same time, shared care needs a certain infrastructure – expectations have to be negotiated at the beginning, and budget needs to be set aside appropriately. In the long term, it is neither fair nor sustainable for care to be based on goodwill alone. 

Bakchormeeboy: Many arts workers are passionate about their craft but also face burnout, financial uncertainty and emotional labour. What do you hope participants will take away that could meaningfully change how they work or support one another after the festival ends?

Gua Khee: The festival offers a range of entry points to engage with care practices. In particular, we have crunchy workshops that introduce practical frameworks such as Nonviolent Communication (‘Beyond Right and Wrong: An Introduction to Nonviolent Communication’ by Tan Yihan and Mayuko Vermeulen), or that provide the opportunity to revisit and workshop previous challenging situations (‘No Compromises Needed: Crafting Work with Care’ by Adib Kosnan). Through these sessions, we believe participants will have immediate tools that they can apply to future collaborations, be it vocabulary to address conflict earlier, or the groundedness to sit with uncomfortable but necessary conversations.

More broadly, we hope participants leave with at least one new relationship, one useful language for naming a challenge, or one practice they can take back into their next project. Change in an arts ecosystem rarely happens through one event alone. But when people realise that others are grappling with similar questions, they can begin to share knowledge, support one another and build more durable relationships over time.

Bakchormeeboy:The programme brings together artists, producers, educators, technicians and audiences. How intentional was it to include different roles across the arts ecosystem, and what conversations are you hoping will happen between people who don’t usually meet?

Gua Khee: It was very intentional! Over the years, CITRUS has observed that similar conversations about wellbeing, workload, and ways of balancing passion and capacity are happening in different disciplines and across different roles; however, people do not always have the time or energy to reach out and connect with each other.

Hence, we wanted the festival to make these people and conversations more visible to one another. A producer, performer, technician, educator or audience member may use different languages and have different needs with respect to care, but there are many shared underlying questions: Who carries responsibility? How are decisions made? What does a sustainable pace of work look like? We hope people leave feeling like they ‘found their people’, as well as with a wider understanding of how their position connects to others.

Bakchormeeboy: The festival includes communal meals, karaoke, participatory installations and informal town halls alongside workshops and discussions. Why was it important for the festival to create these shared experiences instead of focusing solely on talks or panels?

Gua Khee: As important as it is to build discourse around care, we wanted to not just talk about care, but also actually practice the kind of care that we are talking about (:

Shared meals, karaoke, games and gathering spaces allow people to meet without needing to arrive as experts or immediately explain themselves. Instead, they can sit together, play, eat, listen and encounter each other in a different rhythm. These informal ways of getting to know each other sets a warm tone for future relationship-building, and also invites people to approach conversations around care in similar ways – after all, why can’t important conversations also be fun and light-hearted? 

Bakchormeeboy: CITRUS fest is held alongside the Singapore Night Festival, which attracts a broad public audience. How do you hope members of the public who may not work in or be directly involved in the arts, will connect with the festival’s conversations about care?

Gua Khee: We are excited that CITRUS fest is taking place in conjunction with Singapore Night Festival (SNF), because it is important to us that conversations about care do not remain only within the arts. Audiences encounter finished artworks at a festival like SNF, but they may not always see the relationships, negotiations and labour that make that work possible. CITRUS fest invites them to peek into the process behind the scenes.

There are certain concerns we discuss that are specific to the arts sector, but we believe many people will recognise broader questions about exhaustion, boundaries, accessibility and how to sustain meaningful work. During our 2024 pilot, which was held in conjunction with Wellness Festival Singapore, various participants from outside the arts shared that they recognised these issues around fatigue and burnout in their own contexts too.

SNF can be energetic and packed with things to see. We hope CITRUS fest offers a place to pause within that bustle, whether through a walk-in programme, our kopitiam installation or the Rest & Digest Corner, and to ask: What does care look like in my own everyday life? 

Bakchormeeboy: Compared with the inaugural edition in 2024, what lessons or feedback most influenced the design of CITRUS fest 2026, and what new ambitions did you want to realise this time around?

Gua Khee: The 2024 pilot clearly showed that there was an appetite for these conversations, and participants responded positively to having a dedicated space to reflect on care in the arts. At the same time, we agreed that our next edition should feel less like a serious conference and more like an arts celebration – a place where people can encounter and play with ideas through different rhythms, formats and artistic experiences, not only through discussion-based sessions.

The ambition was to make care something that people can encounter, feel, debate about and practise.

With this as our guiding principle, we thus deliberately brought together workshops and conversations with installations, meals, karaoke and programmes that begin with artworks. For example, we partnered Objectifs on How to Smell Spirits?, which brings audiences into a screening of short films by Daniel Hui and Nishok, followed by a conversation about caring for oneself and one’s team when working with emotionally charged material.

Bakchormeeboy: Looking beyond this year’s festival, what would success look like for CITRUS practices? Are there changes you’d like to see in Singapore’s arts ecosystem over the next few years that festivals like CITRUS can help catalyse?

Gua Khee: In the short term, we hope to support more practitioners to kickstart and/or sustain their work around care practices. For instance, CITRUS connected Rayann Condy and Chew Lihong in CITRUS fest 2024 to run a joint workshop on intimacy coordination. It has been meaningful to see how much their conversation and collaboration has deepened since then, and they are returning to CITRUS fest 2026 with a new sharing: ‘Making our Bed: Folding Care and Intimacy into our Culture’. For this programme, they will be presenting insights from other practitioners and stakeholders in the field of intimacy coordination, and we look forward to having a robust discussion with audiences to build yet more knowledge about this field in Singapore.

In the longer term, success for CITRUS would be for care to become an ordinary and properly resourced part of any arts project, rather than an invisible burden carried by one person. That could mean clearer expectations, more realistic timelines with room for rest and reflection, fairer budgets, and shared ways of addressing conflict or access needs. Ultimately, I hope that across the board, arts organisations and funders as well as arts workers and cultural leaders recognise and prioritise care as something that is integral.

CITRUS fest 2026: Kacang Puteh, Care-Oke? runs from 21st to 30th August at 42 Waterloo Street, in conjunction with the Singapore Night Festival. For a full programme line-up, please visit the official website: citruspractices.sg Stay up-to-date with CITRUS fest 2026 at their Instagram: www.instagram.com/citrus.practices