Sand Patch is a speculative environment exploring the contested realities of climate collapse narratives projected onto the Oceanic nation of Tuvalu. It responds to dominant portrayals of Tuvalu as a “sinking nation”—images that, while intended to prompt action, often flatten lived experience and reinscribe colonial logics. Instead of offering correction or resolution, the project assembles a fractured, poetic landscape from field recordings, oral testimonies, photogrammetry scans, and archival fragments—holding space for contradiction and multiplicity.
It also engages Tuvalu’s recent move to become the “First Digital Nation,” preserving its territory through metaversal platforms and online archives. While this act asserts digital sovereignty, it also raises questions about what is rendered visible, what remains outside the frame, and which representational logics are reproduced. The work neither simulates nor rejects this gesture, but sits with its ambiguities—refusing the binary of presence and absence that often defines digital climate imaginaries.
Rather than offering a seamless narrative, the environment embraces incompleteness as a method. It treats digital space not as neutral ground, but as a site of contestation—where meaning is unstable, layered, and shaped by power. In this context, speculative practice becomes a way of resisting closure, foregrounding the ethical stakes of representing places and people beyond one’s own belonging.
