Introduction

Nehal El-Hadi and Glenn Adamson

James Kerwin, Abandoned building, Kolmannskuppe, Namibia, 2019.

Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Book of Sand” takes as its focus an enchanted tome, clothbound and heavy. Borges being of the magical realist persuasion, the volume he describes is infinite. That is, one can page through it endlessly, without finding a repeat, or ever reaching the end. And there’s more mysteries within: each page can only be glimpsed once, never to be seen again. The protagonist of the story is captivated by the book, and its myriad impossibilities; a monstrous obsession takes hold. But the mysterious provenance of the volume is never revealed, for, as Borges writes,  “neither sand nor this book has a beginning or an end.” The tale captures well the nature of sand, a constantly shifting material (actually, it’s a size category – but more on that later), once described by the pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson as “beautiful, mysterious, and infinitely variable; each grain on a beach is a result of processes that go back into the shadowy beginnings of life, or of the Earth itself.” Sand is a planetary archive, broken down from ancient rock formations. It takes millennia for its grains to form, yet it is also vital for the infrastructure of modern society. 

Michael Welland, in his full-length study of the material, provides an eclectic list of its uses: abrasives, electronics, glass, papermaking, artificial islands, nano-engineering, and above all, construction. It has been called “the most important solid substance on Earth.” It is also one of the most heavily extracted and least regulated. The foundation of our cities, it once made up our coastlines and riverbeds. The amount of time required to break rock into sand is so much longer than our human timescales that it is effectively nonrenewable - though some residents are resorting to crushed bottle glass as a way to restore degraded shores. It may well come as a surprise that we are running out of sand. Surely the Sahara alone (3.6 million square miles of it) has more than we’ll ever need? But no. Quite apart from the problems of getting it to where it’s actually needed – an issue with all materials, and particularly those with such a high weight-to-value ratio – not all sand is created equal. 

Around 70 per cent of the sand on Earth is made of quartz, but technically, it is defined by size: any solid matter composed in particles averaging between 0.00039 and 2.0 millimeters in diameter. This designation was first put forward by geologist Chester K. Wentworth in 1922, based on previous work by sedimentologist Johan A. Udden. The Udden-Wentworth scale is considered by the Planetary Society to be the “canonical definition of sediment grain sizes.” (The International Organization for Standardization uses the same range; other standards guidelines differ slightly.) Within the larger category of sedimentary minerals, sand is coarser than silt, and finer than gravel. There’s an intuitive, visceral quality about these categories — we know silt because it is almost soft to the touch, only slightly more substantial than a dusty powder, while gravel is unpleasantly sharp and jagged, capable of indentation and even laceration.

For specific applications, the parameters get a lot tighter. To make the best pounce – the fine sand that was once commonly used to prepare unsized sheets of paper to receive wet ink, and then to dry the ink after writing – either pulverized, calcium-rich cuttlefish bone or the powder of a tree resin called gum sandarac was used. These days, professional beach volleyballers play on regulation sand that is free of organic particles but includes no crushed rock — requirements that help with drainage and protect the players from abrasion. The color of volleyball court sand is also specified; it should “aesthetically pleasing, non-glaring… preferably tan, cream, off-white, beige, blonde, or pale brown.” For golf bunkers, washed sea sand is preferred for its fine, even texture. And as you might expect, sand for construction is graded into many types, based on ingredients, particle size, moisture, and other variables, particularized for use in mixing cement, filling foundations, leveling pavers, and plastering. Within these elaborate classification systems, each grain of sand is only a temporary resident. It is constantly being broken down by environmental erosion, and very often recombined as well. It can even turn back into rock, as in sandstone or the petrified dunes of southern Utah. Always on its way to becoming something and somewhere else, it may not be entirely coincidental that sand is the material we associate most closely with time. This said, it commends itself to use in an hourglass for entirely practical reasons: consistent enough to fall at an even and predictable rate, dry enough not to stick in the throat. 

Hourglass. Photo by Nathan Dumlao.

Hourglasses, ironically, have been around longer than can easily be measured. They were probably invented in Egypt in the 3rd century BCE, and developed into more precise time-keeping tools in medieval Europe. They have long been symbols of temporal passage, and the finitude of human life. Hourglasses commonly appear as motifs on grave markers, which are themselves sometimes fashioned from sandstone – a case of a material being used to depict itself. These days, of course, they have been supplanted by more accurate and convenient clocks. As emblems, though, they are still going strong. 

Earlier this year, the South African singer Tyla carried one as a prop to the Met Gala, signaling its theme “Garden of Time.”  Her dress also appeared to be made out of sand – in fact, it was organza with an applied coating of sand and crystal studs. It hugged her body so closely as to seem a thin joke on the convention of an hourglass figure. It was as if she’d stepped out of one of the vanitas paintings up in the galleries. The garment’s designer, Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing, told Vogue that he’d hoped to “transform a transient material into an everlasting masterpiece.” Yet in its sheer impracticality – a highly irritating second skin – Tyla’s dress was also an acknowledgment of the sensationalistic nature of fashion, which is inherently fleeting: like the pages of Borges’ Book of Sand, once seen, it blows away in the next gust of culture.

For a very different conceptual approach, we can turn to Alice Aycock’sSand/Fans, originally created in 1971 in the basement of a Manhattan gallery. The work consists of four industrial-strength fans placed at the corners of a big sand pile. The criss-crossing currents whip up a vortex which dances in midair, a slow, ever-shifting play of particles whirling just below waist level. Gradually the sand is dispersed into a flat undisturbed field (it takes about two days). In more recent years, Aycock has recreated the piece in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, using handmade electrical fans matching the originals, which she’d bought cheap on Canal Street. In this new context, the whirring fan blades seemed to refer to wind power, which will become increasingly important to the Gulf States as oil reserves are tapped down. As Aycock says, the work became “a reminder that the desert is there – you may not want to think about it, you may want to make these technological environments… but you know somewhere there is the dry desert of existence, waiting.”

Those dunes, out there, are powerful material metaphors, their shapes created through a constant interplay of static mass and turbulent action. It is a high complex dynamic, explored by writers as diverse as the scientist R. A. Bagnold (whose 1974 book, The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, remains a widely consulted text; there are dunes on Mars named for him) and the art historian Michael Baxandall, who saw in this geological phenomenon a mirror to human memory, in which past experiences constantly sink to the bottom of consciousness, only to rise again. 
Perhaps because sand is always on the move, it is ideal for creating transient places – sites of conflict and play, from the ancient gladiatorial arena to the playground sand pit. On a larger scale, desert landscapes are routinely employed as screens for imaginative projection. From the colonialist war zone depicted in Lawrence of Arabia, to Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine (actually shot in Tunisia), to the film adaptations of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic Dune, vast stretches of sand have routinely served as the cinematic canvas for white male heroism. 

Tatooine/Tunisia. Photo by Albina Andreeva.

Samia Henni contests this narrative of “emptiness,” pointing to the actual vitality of deserts, which support “sedentary, nomadic, animal, vegetal, mineral forms of existence.” Unfortunately, the presumption of blankness has long enabled the exploitation and degradation of desert environments, and their social weaponization too, in the borderlands of the U.S. and Mexico, in the Sonoran Desert, of Egypt and Israel, in the Sinai, and between nations innorthern Africa, in the Sahara. At all of these frontiers, a strategy of fatalistic dispersal prevails, with migrants too often left at the desert’s mercy. We began this introduction with Borges, and now close with another of the twentieth century’s great imaginative writers, Italo Calvino. His essay “Collection of Sand” describes an exhibition of bizarre collections he attended in Paris. One strikes him particularly: a woman’s collection of sands from around the world, taken from the coastlines and deserts of Sardinia, the Grenadine Islands, Morocco. (This is a real-world phenomenon; people who collect sand are known as arenophiles, and there is even an International Sand Collector's Society, with a biennial Sandfest.) Trying to decipher the collection, Calvino muses, “Perhaps by staring at the sand as sand, words as words, we can come to understanding how and to what extent the world that has been ground down and eroded can still find in sand a foundation and a model.” We hope you will read this issue of Material Intelligence in this same spirit. Sand is proverbially a material that slips through the fingers, eluding our grasp. There’s only one way to really understand it: just go with the flow.