Paper short abstract:

This presentation proposes the plot hole as a creative ethnographic methodology for unmasking the speculative transformation of territory in the Anthropocene. It will focus on one of the plot holes of Singapore’s geographic expansion: the strategic stockpiles of sand dotted around the island.

Paper long abstract:

While islands across the world are contending with their disappearance amidst rising tides, Singapore has been growing over the last six decades, as if in the throes of a geophysical puberty. Hundreds of millions of tonnes of sand dredged across coastal Southeast Asia have found their final resting place in Singapore's prosthetic territory. This fugitive sediment has been interred by the city-state’s reserve army of migrant workers, living in vast labour camps at the edges of the city, often abutting massive dunes of stockpiled sand, as the city-state’s prodigal appetite has rendered regional sand markets insecure. In 2019, Prime Minister announced that the city-state will spend $1 billion dollars a year until 2100 to mitigate sea level rise, with at least 200 more kilometres to reclaim from the sea. Singapore island’s earliest recorded name was Pulau Ujong, which meant ‘island at the end’. As the plans for 2100 loom, what will become of the island at the end of the world?

This presentation proposes the plot hole as a creative ethnographic methodology for unmasking this speculative transformation of territory. It will do so by focusing on one of the plot holes of Singapore’s geographic expansion: the strategic stockpiles of sand dotted around the island. While Singapore has reduced its reliance on imported sand, it will still need to import millions of tonnes in the years to come to fulfil these plans; the sand stockpile, then, is a figuration of capitalism’s geosocial asymmetries that demands interrogation.