You introduce the concept of “granularity,” a term less common than ‘liquid’ or ‘solid’ for describing matter. In your work on sand, granularity seems to function not only as a description of a material condition but also as an analytical tool for understanding unstable and complex behaviours, revealing processes of friction and resistance. Could you elaborate on what granularity means to you, both as a material property and as a conceptual framework?

My work has been focused on sand as a matter and medium for analysing the built environment. Sand is a unique material due to its physical properties. It can behave like a liquid when dry, a solid when wet, and even a gas when suspended in air. These behaviours counteract sand’s constitutive role for the built environment, sand is the main ingredient for concrete and glass, and more fundamentally, artificial landmass. It is meant to be a highly controlled substance, but the material’s inherent complexity resists such control.

Through the lens of granularity, I can perceive the concurrent processes of material and capital accumulation, deposition, dispersion, and erosion. This allows me to read sand-based infrastructures as less-determined systems that are only temporarily stable and can fail unexpectedly. This becomes a useful analytical tool for the contemporary condition, where many entities are in flux. Many infrastructures only appear stable, solid, and fixed, whereas they can also easily break apart, be undone, or be made otherwise. This is not only a symbolic gesture; many land reclamation projects testify to the significant maintenance they require. Ultimately, focusing on sand’s granularity shifts our attention to the ongoing processes of degradation, renewal, and friction that are often sidelined in conversations about infrastructure.

Within this, one can see how temporality and emergence can be a renewing power that gives agencies or is given by the agencies. In terms oftemporality, your study of sand has spanned a long period and multiple locations, from the Netherlands to Southeast Asia. We are interested in how and why you began to use sand as a critical lens for understanding the environment and its transformations.

My curiosity was driven by the contested role of sand, not just as a building material but as a substance with geopolitical dimensions. I first encountered this aspect during a residency in 2018 between the Philippines and Singapore. In the Southeast Asian context, sand is highly contested; it is mined extensively, often under precarious and sometimes illegal conditions, making it a far more sought-after resource than in Europe.

This led me to investigate the region’s large-scale land reclamation projects, and from there, I turned my attention to the Netherlands as a key site of sand-based infrastructure within Europe. Roughly 17% of its landmass has been reclaimed over the centuries. As I traced the movements of sand, I discovered numerous colonial and neo-colonial ties linking the Netherlands and Southeast Asia. Because of their long-standing leadership in the dredging industry, it is very often Dutch engineers who facilitate land reclamation projects in Southeast Asia. This technological transfer fundamentally shaped infrastructural development and with it sand economies. My research involves moving between scales and localities to understand how technologies and methodologies related to sand travel and function differently across contexts and how these contexts are altered, in return.

You describe sand as always “in between;” it is constantly moving and transforming. We are curious about how you understand this in-between condition and why it is important for your research.

The critical point is that sand, and the places made of it, are never isolated. The man-made infrastructures I study are often analysed primarily for their symbolic and ideological dimensions. These new cities, often designated as smart eco-cities built on reclaimed land, are frequently studied only for their appeals and failures: for what they sell, what they promise, and what they cannot fulfil. However, it is crucial to consider them as material infrastructures with a pre-life and an afterlife. Observing through the lens of sand reveals that the built environment, like sand itself, is always in transition and flux. This fluid state makes it possible to consider disparate processes simultaneously: capital accumulation on one hand and material degradation on the other. A speculative financial project, for example, can simultaneously be ruinous, decaying, and transforming, thus offering a foundation for other futures or lifeworlds.

Instead of focusing solely on the destructive impact of large-scale master plans, this perspective reveals the more vibrant dimensions that coexist and shape these developments. I believe this can be explored through the materiality of sand, through this in-between state.

Your practice is powerful in its capacity to connect people from different fields. For example, you have described sand as a “granular currency” that drives national development, financial speculation, and international prestige. Could you elaborate on how sand functions as an active agent that reveals broader collaborative networks, and how your own practice convenes diverse practitioners?

My new book, Granular Configurations, might be a good example of what sand assembles. The project brings together a range of contributors to show the many perspectives and practices that sand convenes. These range from geology, material science, engineering, urban planning, architecture, as well as artists and scholars from the humanities who think with and through sand as a medium.

I think almost everyone has a relationship with sand, whether it’s just through visiting the beach. Professionally, many people work with sand because it is a widespread material that bridges numerous industries, from construction and micro-technology to energy and consumer products. Sand's ubiquity is part of what makes it so interesting, because we often don't think about it as a special material. What I find compelling about sand is that its crucial role, which cannot be overstated, is often overlooked.

In my own work, I engage with these different forms of knowledge and practice surrounding sand. This involves considering its physical nature, its granularity, and how that nature is employed and operationalised in practices such as coastal morphology and modelling. It is also fascinating that while sand is utilised, it ultimately resists full scientific capture. We build extensively with sand, yet our knowledge of its behaviour remains limited.

Many engineering practices involving sand are highly experimental because it is not fully understood how large quantities will behave once deposited on a coastline or in the ocean. I found it striking that the land reclamation industry is so experimental. Reclaiming land functions as a life-sized experiment, yet it occurs continuously, and people build homes and infrastructure on this newly formed land.

This spectrum ranges from the engineering basis to the lived reality. Many coastal communities in Southeast Asia, for example, live with these infrastructures and the consequences of sand mining. Inhabitants of these new sandy infrastructures, such as citizens of the Netherlands or Singapore, have very different understandings of the environment they inhabit. While this type of analysis is possible with other materials, I have found that tracing sand from its physical foundations to its lived realities is an approach that effectively reveals the complex life of a material.

In your essay “Granular Configurations, or How to Think Planetary Urbanization Against the Grain,” you connect sand, planetary urbanisation, and geological transformation. It reminds us of Catherine Russell’s work on “new sediments,” where techno-materials and cities become entangled with Earth’s geological processes.

If we view human-made structures as a new form of sediment, since they are composed primarily of sand, it radically reframes sand as an agent shaping the planet’s future geology. This seems to challenge not just what geology studies, but how. Traditional geology tends to read the earth as a stable archive of distinct strata, but your granular perspective sees sand as a mobile and fluid actor, which is entangled with other forces. Could you expand on this epistemological shift and how this granular view reconfigures our understanding of Earth’s geological forces?

The Anthropocene Working Group suggests sediment is a key indicator of anthropogenic change, primarily because of the vast quantities of sand that have been mined or removed from river systems. Sand emerges naturally from the weathering of mountains and the crushing of rocks, travelling via rivers to the sea, where it is deposited. Interfering in these material cycles means interfering in geological cycles. This is a significant shift, where huge amounts of sand are taken from natural systems and accumulated in urban centres, making human force visible in geology itself.

This has prompted the discipline of geology to begin looking above the surface, considering the built environment as another layer of sediment. Existing infrastructure can be “re-mined” to repurpose materials, which means the strict separation between what is underground and what is above ground is becoming less distinct.

Sand is not a single substance but a composite. It can be composed of many different materials, including plastics, minerals, shells, and plants. Each locality has a different sand composition that speaks to its specificity and the processes that formed it. By analysing sand’s mineral composition, one can tell its origin. I assume that in the future, these analyses will also reveal various artificial materials. Plastic particles, for instance, can already be found in sand, and some beaches are now composed almost entirely of such synthetic materials. In this way, sand itself testifies to our changing society and, with it, a changing geology.

Generally, sand is in flux. When it is removed from one location and placed in another, the consequences can ripple throughout the entire system, not only at the site of disruption but also far beyond it. This makes assessing the full consequences of mining or land reclamation very difficult, as the effects tend to manifest at distant points in the system. What is certain, however, is that these actions have consequences.

Regarding the communication of your research, you use both film and writing to unfold these processes. At Metamorphic Zone, we are interested in the agency of different media. Your films, White Elephant and Overcast, for instance, create an uncanny and eerie atmosphere. This conveys a capacity for feeling that academic writing often cannot. What does working with film as a medium allow you to express about these landscapes? How do you see these two media functioning in your research?

Primarily, it allows me to create an experience of these places for others to engage with. White Elephant was shot in 2021 during my fieldwork documenting mining and land reclamation projects across Southeast Asia. I was struck by the sheer scale of the Melaka Gateway project in Malacca, which began over a decade ago and remains unfinished. The quiet, eerie atmosphere of the vast, empty reclamation sites was desolate, and I wanted to capture that feeling: the reality of many projects where huge investments meet sudden interruptions, leaving communities with half-built landscapes. The film shows both what was promised and what remains, but it also documents unintended outcomes, such as local communities repurposing abandoned sand piles for recreational purposes.

My other film, Overcast, focuses on these eerie moments of resistance and of life thriving despite the conditions. The film is set in Forest City, another artificial island and eco-smart city in Malaysia, which has often been portrayed in the press as a failed ‘ghost town’. While this is partly true, in recent years the area has attracted animals and local people who have turned the space into their new habitat. The goal was to document how people adapt and occupy this problematic project for their own purposes. Forest City might become an eco-city, but a very different version from what was imagined.

This experiential quality is why I see film and writing as complementary. I use writing primarily for analytical work and to provide necessary context. Film, on the other hand, is a space to explore these landscapes beyond the immediately visible. In editing, I can juxtapose images and sound to create meaning that transcends the visual record. This allows another person to share my experience and sensory perception of a site, such as walking on the beach in Forest City.

The two are always connected, but I try to keep them distinct so the films can stand on their own. My writing is often directed towards an academic or para-academic audience, whereas the films can circulate beyond the academy. They can inform a wider public about these sites and allow them to experience places in all their complexity. I utilise both because together they provide access to the full potential and sensorium of fieldwork.

It seems there is a parallel between the medium and the subject. To communicate effectively about a fluid subject like sand, the method of communication must also be adaptable. A project may need to take different forms for different audiences, just as you use both film and text. In the past, a model for resistance might have been stability. Now, perhaps a different model is needed for operating within conditions of incompleteness and instability. You use the term “think granularly” to respond to this condition. How might the unfinished or unsettled spaces you document open up new possibilities or new forms of life?

Maybe the question could be extended to ask: what methods, concepts, and frameworks are suitable for conducting research in the current condition, where so many conflicting and even antagonistic processes occur at once, and where there is little certainty? For me, ‘granularity’ is a shorthand for a method to make sense of this complexity, of disparate processes that sometimes converge, diverge, or appear in different forms in different times and places. It is a way to find a conceptual tool that helps explain a fractured world across scales, from the planetary to the local, the material to the social.

This approach translates directly into the choice of medium. Using different methods and media to show different aspects of the same subject is a logical consequence of thinking granularly. It leads to acting or designing granularly, where one brings together various perspectives and lenses. The result is something that may be incomplete, but is purposefully attentive to these different viewpoints and scales.