Having your home taken apart to build someone else’s sounds nothing short of disorienting. Still, this has been the experience of rural Southeast Asian communities whose environments are a priceless source of the sand that fuels construction across the region’s sprawling mega-cities. Returning to these communities’ intimate relationship with sand can provide a powerful new perspective on urban development, according to poet and literary critic Joanne Leow.

The 2018 documentary Lost World, made by Cambodian American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam, follows Phalla Vy, a Cambodian fisherwoman whose mangrove home has been severely damaged by the dredging carried out to extract sand for export to Singapore’s construction industry. Since independence, Singapore has expanded its size by depositing sand in the sea—and much of this sand comes from neighboring countries, since domestic supply ran out in the mid-1980s.

In other words, writes Leow, “[t]ransnational sand has become the foundation of Singapore’s infrastructural projects and material development,” and “new land and buildings are literally taken from the waterways and islands of its regional neighbors.”

But the repeated emphasis on Phalla’s point of view in Lost World presents a “singular, personal perspective” that lends a human scale to an “impersonal” and “immense” process, Leow argues. The contrast between these two approaches to the environment climaxes in Phalla’s visit to the tourist attraction of Gardens by the Bay in Singapore, which Leow calls “spectacular glass-domed, climate-controlled gardens that have been built on reclaimed land.”

As Leow describes the scene,

Cutting from a drone shot of the Gardens, we are immediately thrust into Phalla’s auditory and visual experiences as filmed with a handheld camera. […] The handheld camera follows her as she disobeys the rules of this hyper-regulated space: plucking camellias, touching the water features, bringing flowers to her face.

Singapore is internationally famous for its “skyscrapers, orderly public housing, and manicured gardens,” as Leow describes the infrastructure. In fact, “the construction of ever more ostentatious developments on seemingly virgin, new land” has taken on mythic proportions, especially as Singapore has “marketed itself as a model for other developing countries.”

But Phalla invites the unsettling revelation that these grand, world-renowned structures might be a kind of ruin rather than monuments.

“Taking the sand and plants in her hands, she sees what others cannot as they admire the technological feats…: that they are ruins and ruination that extend beyond its own borders and continue to affect ecosystems and communities that have been rendered invisible,” Leow writes.

The sharp contrast between the “glittering skyline” of Singapore and Phalla’s endangered home is brought to the fore when “the film alternates between the impersonal, aerial drone footage of sand dredging and land reclamation and the intimate handheld shots” of her family gathering claims, snails, clams, and crabs for a livelihood.

At the same time, Leow observes that the Lost World short film contains references to Singaporean artist Charles Lim’s multimedia art project SEA STATE, which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Mam incorporates drone footage from SEA STATE and also uses “long shots very much akin to the rhythm of Lim’s film,” Leow notes.

SEA STATE includes photographs of Singapore’s maritime border markers, installation art of sea buoys and coastal plants, and experimental films. As Leow puts it, the artwork “attempts to provide a fragmentary, polyphonic articulation of the strange new world that Singapore has built on what was once sea.”

Together, Mam and Lim “unsettle and bear witness to the invisible collateral damage of Singapore’s infrastructural spectacle—unthinkable on both human and ecological scales,” she concludes.

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