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. The green carpet in the yard also looks like a green screen.
Living in this courtyard at the foot of the dunes, I felt as though nothing could escape the pervasive infiltration and coverage of sand. It evokes certain memories from my childhood—cleaning always felt futile. Sand inevitably "dirties" the space, and in it, the influences of a Damascene wind and the local wind intertwine so closely that they are no longer distinguishable.
Perhaps this is also a dream of my own. In the low-end globalization of Yiwu, I once caught a glimpse of the Syrian war from afar. In the mundane life represented by the Yiwu-style carpet, I always sensed Damascus—both summoning and retreating, shifting its image and form.
"Making the Singing Sand Dunes Sing Again" is a live sound performance I created based on people’s stories and memories.
The sand of Singing Sand Dunes in Dunhuang used to make special roaring sounds—like the noise of airplanes, thunder, or bells. That’s why they were named Singing Sand Dunes. By the late 1980s, these sounds gradually disappeared, in a strangely synchronized way with the course of history. The reasons include environmental pollution and human activity. But during the time I lived at the foot of the dunes, I noticed another kind of thunder/bell sound in the environment—that of the evening bell from Thuner Sound Temple. The term “Thunder Sound” comes from the Buddhist phrase: “the Buddha speaks the Dharma, his voice like thunder”.
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.
My idea was to begin the performance when the evening bell of Thunder Sound Temple rang. It usually sounded just before nightfall, though never at exactly the same time. So we waited quietly together, knowing it could come at any moment. This shared stillness gradually led us into a meditative state. When the bell finally rang, I performed sounds of different textures based on people’s descriptions of their memories. I sampled, amplified, and processed the sound of the fan spinning inside the sand pillow in real time.
Local people talked about their memories of the dunes' sound. There was a very moving moment: an old man who had spent his life copying murals in the Mogao Caves told a story from his youth. One day in the 1980s, he went to the Caves to paint and climbed to the top of the nine-story-high dune. 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.