Liquid Sands

Liquid Sands is a film by Hannah O’Flynn investigating the colonial discourse behind land reclamation projects in both the Netherlands and Singapore. In it, she investigates the process of the state building land on the sea, unfolding the many layers of exploitation it requires. The film 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.

  • Hannah O'Flynn
    Director
    Pain de Fantasie
  • Hannah O'Flynn
    Writer
    Pain de Fantasie
  • Pablo Giménez Arteaga
    Soundtrack
  • Kari Leigh Rosenfeld
    Voiceover
    My Little Sandman, Pain de Fantasie
  • Hannah O'Flynn
    Camara
    Pain de Fantasie
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short
  • Genres:
    Essay Film, Documentary, Experimental, Art Film
  • Runtime:
    25 minutes 11 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    November 8, 2024
  • Production Budget:
    5,000 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Germany
  • Country of Filming:
    Netherlands, Singapore
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Screening: cultural space "with the rubbles of old palaces"
    Berlin
    Germany
    November 8, 2024
    World premiere
Director Biography - Hannah O'Flynn

Hannah O'Flynn is an artist, filmmaker, researcher and curator from Barcelona. Her work examines human and non-human relationships to dominant structures of oppression, and the long histories of organising against them. Her current work looks at food as life-sustaining, cultural ecosystem and political product, and investigates the intersections between food practices, culinary histories, food production and trade, and global politics; attempting, through these intersections, to map global networks of capitalist, colonial and imperialist relations. In 2022 O'Flynn produced SMASHED: Speaking Histories of Insurrection, a collage of interviews around the Irish pub as a political space for community building, oral history transmission and anti-colonial organising in the context of the long British occupation of Ireland. Last year she made the film Pain de Fantasie in collaboration with Kari Leigh Rosenfeld for the exhibition Supply Chain Indigestion with Tian Guoxin, where she examines the intersecting colonial histories of the global expansion of the baguette. She is currently working on the film Liquid Sands, which examines the colonial discourse within the land reclamation projects of Singapore and the Netherlands. Hannah O'Flynn is a graduate of the Kingston School of Art and holds an MA from the Dutch Art Institute.

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