This is a story about lines. Moving lines. Fictional and very real lines. Lines that are drawn on the water. Lines that seem to appear out of nowhere, as if they forgot where they came from. Violent lines. Lines that promise, lines that exclude. Lines of an ever growing “inside”.

Liquid Sands is an exhibition by Hannah O’Flynn investigating the colonial discourse behind land reclamation projects in both the Netherlands and Singapore. By bringing together film, photography and a collection of archival and research material, she  investigates the process of the state building land on the sea, unfolding the many layers of exploitation it requires.

The film, from which the title of the exhibition gets its name, recounts how land reclamation proceeds from the legacy of “terra incognita,”— the colonial ideology that claimed lands “empty” for the purpose of colonial occupation. Liquid Sands unravels how these large-scale engineering projects rely on specific forms of labour exploitation, human displacement, heroic national and sustainability narratives, all while causing severe environmental degradation. In a strange turn of the colonial continuum, land reclamation became the method to expand a nation’s borders into the water — by importing “empty” land from elsewhere.