Title:
Lagos Sand Merchants

Year:
2013

Running time:
9 minutes 21 seconds

Format:
HD digital film, colour with sound

Location:
Lagos, Nigeria

Awards/Credits:
Winner of the ‘Ken Burns Award for Best of the Festival’ – 52nd Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan

Commissioned by Arte Creative – France

‘Lagos Sand Merchants’ is led by the
‘Rotate Mechanism’ – a dynamic revolving device that challenges spatial perception.

‘Lagos Sand Merchants’ focuses on a group of ‘Sand Merchants’ on the outskirts of Lagos, arduously trawling the Lagos State Lagoon to unearth sand deep from the river bed, which will later be offered to the construction industry for sale.

Paused by the lagoon’s edge, the sand merchants employ modest straw baskets to retrieve the heavy wet sand from river bed to boat, and then to the shore where they cluster in heavy heaped mounds.

The repetitious and systematic character of this task is reflected in the mechanism’s rotary nature. As the mechanism is actioned, it rolls the camera forward. Subsequently, the moving image lurches towards the ground and comes back up again, as if surfacing for air.

The mechanism becomes a mirror for the task – producing a rhythmic quality that reflects the monotonous yet poetic relationship between the merchants and the lagoon.