The tactile drawings and artefacts in the design project Neglected Topographies are taken apart yet again as source material, or landscape fragments, with which I had asked the film-maker and photographer Ian Mun (my Tanjong Changi collaborator and fellow intertidal explorer) to reassemble through his filmic lenses. Working with the film footage that he had taken while alongside my coastal (and drawing) expeditions, Ian tried to make sense of these fragments, to (re)story my experimental processes. Once, while stitching the fragments together, he asked: “Do you think the sea came before your work, or the work came before the sea?” I thought for a bit, and then my instinctual reply came: “My work came before the sea. I have always been curious about what ideas and meanings ‘ground’ might have in relation to our modern ways of life in the city.”

The next month, he sent me a film which he had re-stitched: perhaps an addendum to my “topographic” chapters of intertidal ephemerality and fray. Here, I present them as he had sent it—unaltered, in the way he had felt compelled to make sense of the fragments, seeing how he saw the landscape in the drawings/ artefacts, while treading the same grounds as I had.