Our curiosity about sand has uncovered more stories than we ever imagined.

I want to travel with you. Taking you to the beach. Imagine sitting on the beach, as the sun's rays warm you, listening to the sound of the surf, with rising and falling waves. You sniff the salty scent. A bird flies by. The sun casts its rays on the clear blue water. A big wave slams down on the sand and tiny droplets caress your skin. As the waves approach the beach and reel back again, sand moves tumbling in the water violence and beats down on the shore. Experience the softness of sand grains between your fingers and under your feet.

Take a handful of sand. Look at it carefully. You can see that the grains are different in colour and shape. Can you imagine that they come from remote mountainous areas and deserts? These grains have come a long way. They got carried away with rivers and gusts of wind, and now they are in your hand. You have parts of the universe in your hand.

Lucky moment

Looking at these grains of sand causes me a true moment of happiness. In my work at Atelier NL I love examining every grain down to the millimetre and imagining that that grain comes from far away. The more I zoom in on it, the more I learn about history, archaeology and geology. At the same time, I see that every grain of sand is unique. Every grain has its own story to tell, just like every landscape and every human being.

Why is this so noteworthy now? What is the significance of this? Without sand, we wouldn't be able to walk on the beach. Beach holidays wouldn't exist. Without sand, neither would your smartphone. The building you live in wouldn't exist. You wouldn't be able to drive to your workplace. And should you be a flex worker, you would have to do without the internet.

Sand is scarce

How would you feel if there were no more beaches? Did you know that Dubai buys up huge chunks of Australia's beach to make concrete buildings and spruce up islands in the shape of a palm and the world map? And once sand is enclosed in concrete, it stays there for centuries.

Each type of sand is different and each type is used for something different. Desert sand, for example, is too round and smooth to be used for construction. Some types of sand are simply not utilised. Industry selects purely pure white sand to produce glass and computer chips from it. But white sands are becoming scarce. We dredge sand from the ocean floor to build our cities with, but as a result, the coastline is slowly sinking under water.

It is mainly the way we use sand that makes it a scarce resource. What matters here is efficiency for mass production: more, more, more. Of secondary importance are beauty and uniqueness. People are not looking at how we can use sand in better ways. There is both surplus and shortage of sand, contradictorily enough. We seemingly have so much sand and yet wars rage for even more sand.

Wild sand

Back to the little grains of sand we can pick up. They have a great story to tell, if only we take the time and effort to listen to them. Sand has already given us so much; what are the secrets it holds more? For instance, what can we learn from black volcanic, red iron and pink sands or those made of white limestone?

At Atelier NL, we have been studying wild sands from all over Europe and increasingly the rest of the world for six years. In various places in Europe, we followed the routes of Roman glass traders, ran experiments on our findings and made our own glass recipes. We even built our own furnace to make our own glass, because glass furnaces, both those of large companies and those of individual glassblowers, are only used for pure white sand for the sake of production.

Glassware

Using our own kiln, we finally succeeded in creating a glass service from sand from various locations in the Netherlands. Our own soil proved, after heating the sand into glass, to reveal brilliant colours: from very light but also deep dark green shades to brown and even turquoise!

In our new project 'To See a World in a Grain of Sand' we asked people to send us sand from any conceivable place in the world. The aim is to make tangible what immeasurable wealth the ground beneath our feet contains. Apart from a bottle or bucket of sand, people also sent us the story of its origin, or the special meaning the place had for them. Some scooped on the beach where they got married or where they once walked with a special person who is no longer there. Others told that on the sand their first house was built or that it came from the place where they played with their children. When they filled their bottle, the sand transformed into gold as if by magic: after all, it represents a fond memory.

Sand theft

What intrigues me is that because of this simple act, people started asking questions about land as a local resource. May I shovel sand from this beach? Can that then just be sent? And those are very nice questions. Can we just take sand? And what significance does that have?

To be honest, we had not recognised these questions, nor did we expect so many stories to emerge thanks to this project. For instance, our neighbour told us about Ameland, where he has been coming for years. But when he went there again with his family, and with our brief in mind, and found out that his daughters both had a completely different type of sand on their minds, that latest exploration gave him a completely different perspective on Ameland. He saw the island as he had never seen it before.

Since last July 2017, more than 300 sands have been sent to us from all over the world, producing a rainbow of colours.

We always start our work from an earthly fascination and don't need to change the world if necessary. We are simply intrigued by a beautiful material. But as time passes, we begin to wonder things. We discover that the people who join our project have the same questions. We are surrounded by a complex world that we cannot quite grasp. By digging in all sorts of places, we often also deepen all sorts of complicated issues. Our curiosity about sand has uncovered more stories and sparked more discussions than we ever dreamed.

Melt

Like grains of sand, we are all different from each other. Grains of sand each travel a long way before arriving at the beach. Each of us, from whatever background, travels through life in the same way. Like grains of sand on the beach, we come together. Grains of sand can melt into beautiful colours with each other. And exactly that is what we humans are also capable of.

A material like sand is so important in our lives, we cannot live without it. It is so ordinary and yet so incredibly valuable. Not only ourselves but also the people who help us by contributing sand learn to see that and will never again walk through the dunes in the same way or let a handful of sand flow through their fingers.