SAND

Fabric of Reality: Simone Albers at the Grassi Museum

In the summer of 2024, the S.AND team invited two artists to present their work at the Grassi Museum in Leipzig. The event kicked off S.AND’s engagement with non-academic experts of sand, a group we refer to as “sand artisans.”

The S.AND group is interested in what people do with sand and to what ends. We ask ourselves what kinds of geographies people create or destroy with this material and how applications of sand maintain or change urban structures of time and power. The material, cultural, and linguistic multiplicity of sand complicates writing and talking about sand in ways that capture its essence and cultural situatedness. We hoped that developing a better understanding of other approaches to sand would allow us to refine our own representations. Ultimately, S.AND wants to improve ways to communicate sand knowledge, by questioning the epistemological foundation of current analyses and making sand relevant to non-academic audiences.

In September 2024, we had the opportunity to hear the Dutch artist Simone Albers talk about her remarkable work in the Bonvenon Room of Leipzig’s Grassi Museum. Albers’ project “Fabric of Reality” is a creative investigation into the interconnected scales of life. Her paintings both use and depict objects that are microscopically small and incredibly big. Trained in the fine arts at the University of the Arts in Arnhem, Albers taught herself to employ sand in large, colorful landscape pieces. The substance of sand often serves to fracture and pattern depictions of a cosmos or space-like entity that is riddled with amoeba-like creatures. I first met Simone in Leipzig when she took part in the International Art Programme as a resident artist. When I saw her paintings, I was transfixed by their playful engagement with immaterial presences: they conjured up the incomprehensible vastness of the galaxy and left a pleasant feeling of ecstasy. Simone’s work, more generally, revolves around natural spaces, such as the earth’s floors or the galaxy. As a painter, she developed a unique language through which these realms start to communicate. Staring at her psychedelic paintings allowed me to glimpse that, somewhere and somehow, these worlds share a certain dynamic and origin.

After Simone accepted our invitation to talk about her work at the Grassi Museum, we thought that it would be interesting to pair her with Michaela Büsse, an anthropologist of the built environment at the Technical University of Dresden. Büsse is interested in various sociomaterial transformations in the wake of climate change and author of numerous publications on land reclamation and speculative urbanism. What I came to appreciate about her ethnographic work is her strong visual and sensory sensibility to form which is also reflected in her artistic work.

After the presentation of Simone’s artwork and a brief dive into Michaela’s work, the conversation partners quickly pivoted on the messages that one can convey through working with sand.

Michaela Büsse: “Most of your work comes across as very hopeful and playful, whereas most of my footage rather has a maybe dystopian vibe. I would like to talk about our practices and ask you, what do we want to tell with sand?”

Simone Albers: “I agree, it’s totally different but also very fascinating to see what you do. I think it’s way more practical. You actually are looking at all these projects, what people are doing with sand and what implication it has for people that live there. And that’s something, like the whole social aspect of sand, it’s super interesting to see how you research that. And you show us that through your video work.”

Michaela Büsse: “When I think about sand, it’s hard not to think of those big infrastructures that facilitate the sand movement. So, I very rarely get the chance to think about the sensorial qualities of sand. Though I did actually collect sand samples in all of the place I went but I never really found out what to do with them. So, I was wondering if you could speak about the way you work with sand as a medium.”

Simone Albers: “I think, it comes from me being a painter for 10 years. I’ve tried to do things with just paint… like water color, diluted or using all kinds of inks on a flat surface. I work a lot with the canvas on the floor where I let the paint make traces. I work with a lot of water. And then, for some reason, I also worked with structure and it took another dimension; this tactile thing that, I think, painting can also have. It’s also about not just working with representation, but also imitating and just showing the material, which is about the disembodied meaning of sand. And I do like the texture. Some people don’t even recognize [the material] as sand, because in a lot of the paintings I mix it with color. So, it gets a bit more mysterious […]. It is also inviting for people to touch it. People want to see how it feels. Which is positive, [even if] I don’t really like it. But I think it’s good that it evokes something.”

While Albers and Büsse were both concerned by the social and ecological consequences of sand extraction, they used very different methods to address this phenomenon. Büsse acknowledged how she hadn’t found a way to weave sand samples into her representation of the material. Büsse’s interest in making sand “speak” led Albers to reflect on how sand allowed her to express a thought, an emotion, or an observation. Imitation of the material seems key here. Working texture and movement into her paintings through the use of sand grains becomes a way to evoke feelings in spectators. It triggers a disembodiment where the play of color and tactility serve to separate sand from its material form.

What does this mean for social research on sand? Can we imitate or translate the material qualities of sand to capture social effects? After listening to the talk, I wondered how ethnographic description can achieve something akin to “touch.” If art allows sand to spill into the present, allowing art to become disembodied and inform conversations about planetary futures, how can it also texture research?