Eko Atlantic

For the Lebanese company South Energyx, Hans Wilschut photographed the making of Eko Atlantic in Lagos, Nigeria. On the edge of Victoria Island, a new coastal city is rising on land reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean. Where there was once water, an urban landscape of sand, stone, infrastructure and promise is slowly taking shape.

The photographs show an area in the making, before it has fully become a city. They focus on the moment in which landscape and construction overlap: reclaimed sand plains, machinery, temporary structures and the first outlines of a future skyline. In this project, the creation of new land becomes visible as an ambitious, but also strangely human gesture, an attempt to redraw the boundary between city and sea.