An ongoing collaborative essay-film set in Tuinderslust, a 91-year-old self-governed allotment garden (volkstuin) in Rotterdam. Founded in the 1930s as unemployment relief, the site mirrors the shifts of an industrial city: transforming from subsistence to recreation. The film reads the site through archives and the landscape itself, tracing the evolving connection between land, migration, and people.
This work collaborate with Mira Ying & Xiao Yu. Premiered at NoR Festival 2026: Below (Between (Upon (Within))), a self-organised festival that reimagines Tuinderslust as a living, decentralised network.
Time, in a volkstuin
In Yu Yin's Chapter 1, she follows the water. Drawing on Tuinderslust's archive and the infrastructure around it, the film watches how ground and water act on each other: the ditch that drains the land is also the line that divides it. The ground lies below sea level; it was a polder long before it was a garden, and it stays a garden only for as long as the water is pumped out of it. Zooming out from one plot to the river and the port, water and land are redirected, reclaimed, reassigned — the same operation repeats at every scale. What is offered here as nature is provided, and has to be maintained.
