It is a weekend, and I am in my father’s office. I look out of the window and see bulldozers moving across the edge of a plain of sand etched against the sea … I see ridges containing acres of shallow water foaming around streams of sand as it is pumped in.

‘There’s Sand in My Infinity Pool’ explores land reclamation in Singapore as a speculative material and cultural practice. Typically presented as either a practical engineering feat or an ecologically disastrous approach to coastal development, the significance of land reclamation in the cultural formation of identity and landscape has yet to be addressed. Given the ongoing and speculative nature of land reclamation, this practice-led research seeks to position land reclamation as a form of writing to identify the rewritten boundaries of memory and identity, unearthing the unacknowledged implications of land reclamation as a material and cultural practice in the formation of national identity. Sourced from interviews, ethnographic accounts, and autoethnography, the narratives examine what it means to live with and through land reclamation.

William Jamieson is a PhD candidate 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 enhance our understanding of how space is ‘read’ and ‘written’ by capital. His project concerns dynamics of land reclamation in Singapore and sand extraction across Southeast Asia. He took the Site-Writing module as part of the MSc in Urban Studies. His fiction has appeared in Ambit and The Evergreen Review, and other writing about Singapore has appeared in Failed Architecture. His fiction pamphlet, Thirst for Sand, was published by Goldsmiths Press in 2019.

Site-writing allowed me to write for real – that is, write in a way that attempted to encounter the world, which is still very much an ongoing and everyday attempt. While my practice has remained textual, for the most part, the objects and modes of relation it tries to bring into correspondence are anything but. In trying to fashion a frame through which materials may appear to speak for themselves or others, site-writing has provided an invaluable grammar for doing so in a way that registers the ethical stakes of those encounters, and (hopefully) makes something of them.

Tan Pin Pin, To Singapore with Love, 2013, Singapore. (Film).

Charles Lim Yi Yong, SEA STATE, 2005 – Present, Singapore (art works)

David Jones, The Anathemata, 1952, London. (Poetry/novel)