Icarus Complex ASBL (non profit)

Massive piles of sand quietly sit behind high fences, dredged and imported from afar. Once sand quarries, Singapore’s Tampines district now holds grains of promise: the raw marrow of the built environment that feeds the city-state’s ongoing land reclamation and public housing projects. Here, prosperity and national security reside not yet in towers, but quietly in the earth itself.

Chen Zhan (@chen__zhan) is an artist, independent filmmaker, anthropologist, and UK-registered architect. She is the co-founder of ‘field-0’, a collaborative practice that trials situated, sensorial approaches to dissecting planetary interconnectedness. Since 2023, Chen has been on a pilgrimage journey in Southeast Asia, following sand and water along the Mekong River Basin, seeking to reconnect with the fundamental elements of the built environment.

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The built environment encompasses systems of buildings, roads, public infrastructure and utilities shaped through constant interaction with the natural ecosystems that surround and sustain them: rivers, forests, soils and climate.

We invited Icarus Complex readers and contributors to participate in a shared experiment that asks a simple but revealing question: how do they experience climate as it interacts with the built environment through its designs, failures and adaptations?

As part of the Built Environment series, conversations, photo essays, reportage and immersive features explore how the built environment relates to and is reshaped by the systems underpinning climate change.

Curated by Rupal Rathore. View all selected photographs via the link in bio 🔗

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#sandmining #urbandevelopment #southeastasia #builtenvironment #photofeature