The Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre hosted the screening of two insightful documentaries: Flow of Sand which showcases the life of people and the disruption to the environment caused by land reclamation projects in Malacca, Malaysia; and City of Sand which captures the lives of sand in the city of Accra, providing an intimate insight into the environmental and social changes underway in the expanding metropolis. The screening was followed by conversations with the documentary producers, Dr Monika Arnez and Dr Kate Dawson, who discussed the socio-ecological changes and the complexities of urbanisation the flow of sand symbolises. This event was recorded and the video can be watched here.
The documentary film Flow of Sand (2020) directed by Monika Arnez is set against the backdrop of Chinese investment in real estate in Malaysia and the political transition following the May 2018 legislative elections. Futuristic, large-scale land reclamation projects are visible expressions of these investments. Two case studies are explored, ‘Melaka Gateway’ in Melaka and ‘Forest City’ in Johor, both launched in attractive places by the sea. Both are part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The film reveals the ambitions of land reclamation in Malaysia and its contradictions: the aspiration to create a pleasant environment for well-off people and the negative impacts on peoples lives and the ecosystem. As it tells the story from the perspective of affected people in Melaka, the film raises questions about the projects’ unwanted effects such as social inequality and destruction of the environment. The film was implemented as part of the Horizon 2020 project „Competing Regional Integrations in Southeast Asia“ (2017-2021). The project‘s final scientific report hailed it as „a signature success of CRISEA's dissemination efforts“ and highlighted its relevance to CRISEA's core theme and challenge of working across scales in multiple contexts and with diverse stakeholder approaches. „Flow of Sand“ has been screened at various institutions in Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Thailand and Vietnam.
CITY OF SAND takes sand as an entry point into the urban life of Accra, Ghana. Like elsewhere, in Accra, sand is unearthed from the city’s surrounding lands to facilitate the production of an expanding concrete urbanity. Responding to the reality that sand underpins the city’s infrastructure and livelihoods, while impacting farmlands and ecologies, the film brings sand miners, truck drivers, farming communities and educators into the same audio-visual space to unpack what sand means in contemporary Accra and how we might better manage this depleting resource at the heart of an urban planet. Visual materials shot by videographers Cle Gyimah, Katharina Hemmler (drone) and Kofi Asare (drone) are reworked into three blocked screens that bespeak the multiple vantage points through which sand might be understood, as well as emerging as reminiscent of a sedimentary system itself. The film is underpinned by a series of tracks produced by artist Emma K. Hanson, bringing soundscapes from the visual material into conversation with original sound work to re-imagine how we might hear and listen to the City of Sand. These tracks provide the sonic scaffolding upon which the visual material is made variously in/visible at different moments throughout the film. Together, by tracking sand’s shifting intersections with people and place, the documentary manifests as an audio-visual rendition of an urban landscape in-the-making.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Monika Arnez is Associate Professor for Asian Anthropology at Palacký University, Czech Republic. She has published on entanglements of state and non-state actors in resource conflicts and environmentalism. She was Excellent Researcher in the Sinophone Borderlands project and participated in the Horizon 2020/FP7 project “Competing Regional Integrations in Southeast Asia” (CRISEA).” As part of her work on the environmental and social impacts of land reclamation in Malaysia for CRISEA she realised the documentary film “Flow of Sand” (2020). Recent publications of hers are Ethnic politics and ambivalent imaginaries of the future at the Melaka Straits (Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2023) and Environmental Protest Aesthetics as Decolonial Worlding (European Journal of East Asian Studies, 2022).
Dr Kate Dawson (rareearth-art.com) is a Lecturer in Environment, Politics and Society at University College London (UCL). She holds a PhD in Human Geography & Urban Studies, through which she was able to examine the socio-natural politics of sand in Accra, Ghana. Her postdoctoral work has expanded engagements with the politics and geopoetics of sand through film, writing and policy. She is currently part of a British Academy funded project entitled, ‘Mining for Meaning: the Geoethics of Extractive Industries’ which examines the Geoethics surrounding the mining of polyhalite, platinum and diatomite in the UK, South Africa and New Zealand respectively.
William Jamieson is a writer and geographer, and currently a postdoctoral research associate in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work is concerned with the integration of political geography and literary theory through critical-creative writing methods to understand how space is “read” and “written” by capital. His research explores the global sand crisis, land reclamation, urbanization, and Singapore's subsurface expansion. His fiction pamphlet, Thirst for Sand, was published by Goldsmiths Press in 2019.
Dr Thomas Smith is Associate Professor in Environmental Geography at the LSE. He teaches on a number of environmental courses, focussing on innovative technology-enhanced experiential learning and field-based education in geography. He holds a PhD in Physical Geography from King’s College London and has held Visiting Fellow posts at the National University of Singapore, Monash University Malaysia, University of Wollongong (Australia), and Universiti Brunei Darussalam. Tom is a geographer and environmental scientist, specialising in interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the role of biomass burning in the Earth system. Tom enjoys highly collaborative research focusing on greenhouse gas and reactive emissions from wildland fires in savannas and tropical peatlands. He is particularly interested in complex interactions between agricultural practices, land degradation, fire emissions characteristics and their associated impacts. Expertise include infrared and VNIR spectroscopy, tropical environmental change, wildfire spread modelling, knowledge exchange, and land management decision support.