Sand
*Illustrations by Coco Guzmán.
I have collaborated with and worked alongside others to translate my research on human-sand relations into various expressions:
Released in July 2024, I guest-edited an issue of the Chipstone Foundation publication Material Intelligence on sand, alongside editor-in-chief Glenn Adamson.
In July 2024, I attended the Banff International Curatorial Institute, where I focused on what Dele Adeyemo refers to as “sedimentary circulations” in both his film Wey Dey Move (2022) and Ali Cherri’s The Dam (2022).
In spring 2024, I participated in the Toronto School of Puppetry’s Puppetry eXploratory Laboratory, where I developed “Ramla & the Desert,” a shadow puppetry installation; this is currently in pre-production.
In September 2023, I attended the Film Criticism Forum in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, where the theme was Technology and the Film Viewing Experience — there I delivered a talk titled “Wind, Water, Sand, and Fire: Atmospheric CGI from Film to Virtual Reality.”
In May 2023, I delivered the keynote talk, titled “Granular / Oracular: On sand, geomancy and circuitry” at York University’s STS Grad Student Association conference titled “Generative STS: Creating Terrestrial Connections through Art and Alternative Senses.”
Haboob, an immersive VR experience commissioned by New York Live Arts/Oregon Shakespeare Festival for QuillsFest 2022, alongside Ayodamola Okunseinde, tUkU Matthews, and Salil Parekh.
A sand creature was commissioned for Public Visualization Studio’s 2022 Nuit Blanche Installation, Fabulous Ones.
In February 2022, I delivered a talk for Slow Factory’s Open Edu climate education series titled “Poetics, Politics, and Paradoxes of Sand.” This talk was featured in an episode of the CBC Radio One scholarly radio documentary series, Ideas.
Research Overview:
This sand project — that investigates Black life through our connections to sand — is a work of radical interdisciplinarity. My research over the past seven years draws from media coverage, scholarly research, policy papers, documentaries, artworks, and popular culture to locate and describe the relations between the environment and Black life. It is also a project that has allowed me to gather and work from various aspects of my identity as I draw from my lived experiences as a Black, Arabic-speaking, East African woman; my professional training as an environmental journalist; and my education as an urban planning scholar.
One of the biggest challenges in communicating environmental issues is maintaining the narrative complexity required for the economic, ecological, sociopolitical, and geographical entanglements of resources, people, processes, and flows.
I shift between sand as matter and material, substance and concept, thing and non-thing. Sand itself, however, is none of the above. Rather, it is a granule size category that shifts slightly depending on which standard is used. Sand lends itself to such slipperiness because of our associations with it. Because of its Earthly ubiquity, sand encounters are a universal experience — most, if not all of us, have some kind of familiarity with sand, including body memories. Sand is an archival material, broken down from larger formations; and as sand itself is broken down into something smaller (the next size category down is silt), there is a temporariness, an ephemerality to each grain. Sand can also be reversed, and through gravity and pressure, turn back into sedimentary rock.
Sand can consist of broken-down rock, minerals, and organic matter, and beyond being insoluble, its chemical properties depend on its constitution, which varies depending on source and location. Inland, silica in the form of quartz (SiO2) is the most common constituent, while along shorelines, calcium carbonate from ancient lifeforms is more prevalent.
Sand is used to build cities, develop technology, in countless industrial processes. The most suitable sand for construction comes from coastal and riverine areas because of how the sand is formed there. While recent headlines have raised the alarm about how the world is “running out of sand,” the actual truth is that we are running out of easily extractable sand — future extraction will be more difficult, expensive, and destructive. In our human temporalities, sand is a nonrenewable resource as it takes millennia to weather down a mountain into grains. Environmental journalist Vince Beiser’s excellent 2018 book, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, thoroughly lays out how our insatiable demand for sand to drive global urban growth is leading us to the precipice of environmental crises.
Sand is the material we associate most closely with time both physically through its presence in hourglasses, and metaphorically in expressions and idioms related to time’s passage (“sands of time,” “footprints in the sand”). In English, sand’s influence on language can be seen in how it is connected to creativity, courage, conflict, and cowardice through sandboxes, grit, arenas, and burying one’s head in it. The Arabic word for sand, رمل (raml), is used to describe a specific metre in Arabic poetry.
Sand geographies — deserts, beaches, waterbeds — have specific and well-documented ecological, environmental, economic, and sociopolitical entanglements. Sand sourced from beaches and waterbeds is most suitable for construction, and the sand diving communities alongside coastal areas have been most impacted by rapid urbanization and its rapacious demand for sand. Deserts become weaponised through the militarisation of the borders that traverse them; in the Sahara, this has become the world’s largest-scale migrant crisis, as thousands of people disappear without a trace, at least twice as many as those that drown in the Mediterranean.
In 2022, I delivered a lecture for the New York-based environmental advocacy group Slow Factory titled “Poetics, Politics, and Paradoxes of Sand.” In it, I explained how I was thinking about, through, and with sand as both haptic material and useful metaphor through which we could grasp the complexity of our contemporary challenges.
“Poetics because sand infiltrates our languages and desires. It's the material we associate most with temporality, poetics because sand is beautiful, is made beautiful and can make beautiful… Politics, because sand’s movement around the world and our movements on sand are established, controlled, and determined by states and markets… And paradoxes. A paradox is something that contains two opposite things that happen to be true at the same time, like sand is plentiful, and we're running out of sand. A grain of sand is miniscule, but sand can shape mountains. And the meta paradox that underpins my talk today: sand builds our worlds and our demand for sand is destroying our world.”
In the Haitian literary and aesthetic movement Spiralism, I find a useful directive for my explorations. In his novel Ready to Burst, poet and artist Frankétienne provides a description of Spiralism, and I draw from this description a reference point that provides the methodological approach, theoretical grounding, and ontological framework for my project:
“Spiralism defines life at the level of relations (colors, odors, sounds, signs, words) and historical connection (positionings in space and time). Not in a closed circuit, but tracing the path of the spiral. So rich that each new curve, wider and higher than the one before, expands the arc of one’s vision. In perfect harmony with the whirlwind of the cosmos, the world of speed in which we evolve, from the greatest of human adventures to struggles for liberation, Spiralism aligns perfectly — in breadth and depth — with an atmosphere of explosive vertigo; it follows the movement that is at the very heart of all living things. It is a shattering of space. An exploding of time.”
As the originary point of the spiral, I examine and re-examine William Blake’s proverbial grain of sand. And through this material agency, what impacts, effects, and influences does it have on Black life?
This is a project of personal significance. The Sahara featured prominently in my childhood: I was born and spent part of my childhood in Khartoum, Sudan, which is built on the Nile Valley and located in the Saharo-Sahelian zone. My adolescence was spent in Muscat, Oman, at the edge of the Arabian desert, south-east of the Empty Quarter. It is also a project that has only grown in urgency as the war that began in Sudan in April 2023 has displaced millions of Sudanese — hundreds of thousands of these have crossed the Sahara, north to Egypt, east to Saudi Arabia, south to South Sudan, and west, into Chad.
In Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “The Book of Sand,” the eponymous object is an enchanted tome, clothbound and heavy. The book’s impossibilities entice the story’s protagonist, its pages infinite and never-repeating, and a monstrous obsession takes a hold. The mysterious provenance of this Book of Sand, so called because “neither sand nor this book has a beginning or an end,” is never revealed. When I embarked on this specific project years ago, I could not have imagined how monstrously large it would become.
