“this land was the sea”: The Intimacies and Ruins of Transnational Sand in Singapore

Abstract:Singapore's urban infrastructures–its reclaimed land, gleaming skyscrapers, orderly public housing, and manicured gardens–are central to its image as a successful postcolony and global city. This article examines the work of the Singaporean conceptual artist Charles Lim and the Cambodian American documentary maker Kalyanee Mam in unsettling and bearing witness to the invisible collateral damage of this spectacle. Lim's transmedial project, SEA STATE, attempts to catalogue, record, and understand Singapore's immense territorial changes through a variety of media. Mam's short film The Lost World follows a Cambodian fisherwoman and the devastation of her native mangrove swamp as it becomes a source of sand for Singapore. These texts are in a transnational dialogue on the scale, intimacies and ruins of the city-state's rapid development.