with Dan Archer

Exhibited with “Shifting Sands”, Chi Yin's project from 2017-18 surveying the global depletion of sand, with a photographic installation at Gropius Bau.

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“It was midnight. I had just hung up after saying goodnight to my children on my mobile phone. Tree branches snapped violently somewhere behind me. Dogs howled. Chicken squawked in panic. I jumped up, out of bed, turned around, and watched my mattress float away…”
- Seamstress Tong Thi Mong Trinh

In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, land about the size of a football field is melting away into the river every day now — the consequence of large-scale sand mining as well as China’s dams upstream. For local residents, the land snaps off suddenly, sometimes in the dark of night, and robs them of their homes, livestock and ancestral shrines.

This VR piece uses photogrammetry imagery and film that Sim shot in the Mekong Delta in 2017 of a village just five days after a devastating erosion — to bring the viewer to the site of the landslides, and allow local villagers who lost their homes to speak directly to the viewer.

The abstracted aesthetic reminiscent of granular particles transposes us into a night-time, riverside landscape. Narrated by Vietnamese writer Khai Don, who collaborated with Sim in field, we are taken on a journey to a site of erosion and contemplate the effects of rapid global urbanisation. As we shine a torchlight on a house that turns into ruins, we hear Khai Don’s poetry as well as local folk songs and lullabies Sim recorded in field. They sing of life along the Mekong River, presciently contemplating its precarity and lamenting loss — leaving us resonant notes as we grapple with the complex and often-irreversible effects of human extraction and climate change.