Hantao Li's 2026 FVU-commissioned film Giants’ Anatomy features as part of the group exhibition "From The Land" at Proposition Studios in Bethnal Green.
About the work
Combining real-world footage with computer-generated imagery, Hantao Li’s Giants’ Anatomy envisions a speculative journey for decommissioned North Sea oil platforms, situated in a liminal Scottish landscape — at once dystopian and epic in its scale.
The oil industry is a major source of carbon emissions driving climate change, while the offshore oil rig sector has sharply declined since 2014. The number of active platforms fell from over 5,500 in 1981 to under 2,000 by 2023. Many decommissioned rigs now sit in places like Scotland’s Cromarty Firth or are sent to distant ship-breaking yards, shifting environmental impacts out of sight, while some await possible reactivation.
At times as absurd as it is strikingly plausible, the film plays with notions of truth and reality while asking us to consider all possible futures.
About the exhibition
FROM THE LAND brings together works that examine the relationship between architecture and the living world. The projects approach architecture as a moment in a broader material flow, one that begins in the landscapes where resources are sourced, passes through the built environment, and ultimately returns to the earth. In doing so, they ask what it means to build with an awareness of what came before and what will remain: the soils disturbed, the habitats displaced, the carbon released and the matter that persists long after a building's useful life has ended.
The exhibition gathers propositions that aim to recalibrate how architecture engages with land, matter and climate. Together they imagine futures in which architecture supports the diversity of life, attending to the ecological, social and political systems that sustain it, rather than primarily serving the logics of extraction and development. They range from experiments grounded in real materials and places to visions that are openly speculative: designs, systems and strategies that take seriously the entanglement of the built and the living, mapping a field of possibility.
The works represent emerging approaches to material and land use in one of the most resource-intensive industries on the planet. Experimental and in many cases ongoing, they offer a glimpse of where a new generation is taking the profession. Across the exhibition, familiar questions of form, structure and programme are reframed through the lens of stewardship: who owns the land, who benefits from its resources, and who bears the cost of extraction.
This collection of artefacts invites you to reimagine how the places we create can support the lives of the more-than-human. In the production of materials, through habitat creation, in the conversion of waste into things of value. And in doing so to question how we might build differently, and for whom.
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Giants' Anatomy (2026) has been commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella as part of FVU New Takes. FVU New Takes is supported by Jerwood Foundation. Exhibition partner: Arnolfini, Bristol. FVU and Arnolfini are supported using public funding by Arts Council England.