The politics of sand 1
2021
Installation, performance, sound
I installed a carpet in a courtyard where I lived at the foot of the Singing Sand Dunes in Dunhuang ("Sand City" in China), creating an outdoor indoor space with a pillow filled with sand from the dunes and a fan driven by a chip, programmed to make the fan spin at a speed based on the real-time wind speed in Damascus. Sometimes the sand spilled out with it. Every day, I cleaned the area with a Chinese bed brush. I felt like I was removing sand from both the Dunes and Damascus at the same time.
Dunhuang has been known before as “Sand City ", and I want to discuss sand in the abstract here. "Sand City" is one of the driest places in China, and it has always been at the crossroads of Eastern and Western China, a critical point where people have entered the "arid world" while Han culture is still dominant. The "arid world" mentioned here is in the sense of Masaaki Sugiyama. In Eurasia or "Eurasia-Africa", which includes North Africa, there is a vast desert (沙/漠/“bi-a-ba-n” in Farsi). Droughts were common in this area, causing migrations that could easily lead to unrest and regime changes. In the age of maritime power, the "arid world" meant backwardness. The Arab Spring was linked to a drought. Damascus is in the Chinese imagination of a distant war, a mirage in Chinese cyber polemics. It is both a base for constructing “the Chinese dream” and a disturbance of it. Syria, once an Arab country with a relatively well-developed industrial system, is now fractured like sand.
Living in this courtyard at the foot of the dunes, I felt as though nothing could escape the pervasive infiltration and coverage of sand.
The sands of Dunhuang's Singing Sand Dunes used to make the sound of aircraft roaring, thunder or bells, and by the late 1980s these sounds had gradually disappeared, in some strange synchronization with the course of history. The reasons for this are environmental pollution and human activity. Yet there is another kind of thunder/bell sound when I was living there, and that is the evening bell of Leiyin (Thunder sound) Temple. The expression “thunder sound” comes from “Buddha speaks like thunder”.
“Making the mute Singing Sand Dunes sing again” was a live sound performance. I sampled, amplified and processed the sound of the fan spinning in the sand pillow in real time, and chose the exact time when the “thunder” sound started.
If sand is geographic noise, what is the sound it makes directly? Ironically, when human activity mutes the sand, the sound performed live here contains both the sound of sand and the sound of human activity (which makes the fan spin). It is also difficult to distinguish between the two.
The audience in this performance was mainly local people, who shared their memories of the sound of the singing sands together after the performance that day. An elderly gentleman who had spent his life copying murals in the Mogao Caves told of an experience from his youth, when one day in the 1980s, on his way to the Mogao Caves, he climbed to the top of the nine-story high hill. That day the sand was slabbing together from the rain and moving down as a whole, and very rarely, a deep rumbling sound was heard from all sides. “Just like what I heard today”, he said to me.