ADMA 2023-2024

I question what the role of packaging could be, in understanding our capitalocenic interdependence with living and non-living beings.
 In a 2022 UN report on sand and sustainability, sand is reported to become scarce as it is the second most used resource, after water, on earth. It is present in every building and road and in all the screens of devices we use daily. As abundant as it seems, it is predicted to become scarce due to overconsumption by industrial use. In my artistic practice, the metonymy of packaging and preciousness, jewellery boxes being a well known example, becomes a means to question how the finitude and thus the value of this raw material and the consequences of its extraction are underestimated. Through re-making and repairing industrial sand packaging by hand and crafting new ways of packaging, I search for slow and gentle ways to visualise a sense of care for materials.

My research questions are:

• How can the metonymy of packaging and preciousness be made into images and objects, by visualising this ecological interdependence of people and materials, to further shift public discourse to a notion of radical care?

• How can the personal feeling of home (shelter and safety) be translated to global care for the planet?

• What part can sand play here as an exemplification for material finitude?

And to make these work-able I start with:

• How do we pack sand?

While reading about sand as a precious mined material, I am also beginning to understand its relevance in the framework of political ecology, delving into sustainability, sea level rise, the dichotomy between rich and poor countries in sand trade, land ownership, and the environmental repercussions of extraction.

I find urgency in the need to connect to this broader socio-political landscape, particularly issues of political conflicts and social justice related to sand, to personal themes which have been part of my artistic practice such as packaging, preciousness, and the concept of home. With my work I want to peel back layers of the poetic to reveal these political aspects.

I work with methodologies such as urban foraging to find objects and materials related to packaging. I use dystopian science-fiction writing as a tool for possible futures storytelling and to create a narrative to support the objects that I make. With slow repetitive drawing, mainly frottage techniques I capture wall textures. Marker drawings of weaving help me understand the simple yet intriguing rhythm of this craft which is also used in sand bags. I take wide-angle photographs of construction sites and traces of houses that are no longer there and macro images of different minerals of sand and its packaging. Scale plays an important role in my work, and the juxtaposition of the macro and micro shows sand as both a small particle and a representation of a larger resource system. I make objects which act as carriers, they sometimes intentionally fail and sometimes accidentally succeed, out of found or recycled textile, wire, tissue, cardboard, flockfoil, balsa wood, paper and polyethylene plastic. This small scale making challenges the disposability ingrained in our society and juxtaposes large industries such as packaging manufacturing and sand mining.

The current outcomes of this project are an installation shown at het Bos. It consists of 16,8 kg of sand, the global daily demand per person, in various forms of packaging which serve as rations. These are accompanied by a short fictional story set in the year 2052 where sand is extremely rare. It describes one day in the life of the main character who lives in a city where the buildings and the governmental organisation of care are both structurally deteriorating.

To further situate this topic, I made an archive of digital and analogue sources of writing, for a better understanding of the international political and social issues involving sand. This archive is a tool to map out and connect different geo-locations such as Belgium and the Netherlands, with f.i. Singapore and Vietnam, based on their commonality of the industrial displacement of sand.

Movement in space, scan copy Sahara sand grain, scanned on the 26th of April 2024

Frottage drawing wall crack, 24th of April 2024

23.05.24 De Keyzerlei 2, 2018 Antwerpen

Weaving 2.2, woven on the 8th of March 2024