Merging documentary and fiction, Sinkholes is a dystopian vision of a future world where rain has ceased and water is scarce. The inhabitants of a desolate coastline are trapped between a desertified interior and an unnamed coast. Here, Lawrence must make a final journey from the salt-drowned Sinkhole ridden shores of his human settlement, to a hoped-for source of fresh water inland. Told in his voice-over, the story unfolds through a sequence of documentary scenes, shot around the Dead Sea in Israel and Palestine. While the landscapes and sites are real – the narration transforms these into the ruins of an entire doomed society.
Sinkholes imagines a moment in which time has come to a standstill, technology has devolved to simpler forms and the planet itself has regressed to inorganic and mineralogical processes. Threading together references to a history of artists fascinated by ideas of entropy and the post-human – from JG Ballard to Robert Smithson – Sinkholes is a disturbing and visually haunting mediation on what makes us human; on our desire both for survival and resignation in the face of the possibility of extinction.