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More-than-human conviviality describes how humans might live with other beings in relations of cooperation, interdependency, and radical equity. Geologic conviviality explores this question with a focus on materials like rocks or sand. This article documents an artistic experiment that explored what conviviality with sand can mean within the extractivist setting of the Netherlands. Based on arts-based research and inspired by Indigenous approaches, the experiment involved making an installation, a poem, and a video and facilitating two workshops. Four situated and sensory experiences recurred across the making and workshop processes in engaging with sand: discomforting, soothing, harmonizing, and resisting. Some experiences pointed to frictions when participants felt uncomfortable touching sand or when participants raised questions of anthropomorphism and elitism. Other moments showed ontological shifts when participants reflected on becoming ‘Sandpeople’. These different experiences show that artistic experiments can generate ontological openings that trouble ingrained hierarchies and relations. Yet, while for some, these openings created space for new human-sand relations, for others, they offered the opportunity to redraw the distinction between humans and sand and justify human exceptionalism. These boundary-drawing practices can be seen as ontological gatekeeping, which limits the ability of experiments to foster geologic conviviality. We conclude by discussing the importance of fundamentally questioning extractivism as a dominant logic that enables violence, exploitation, and injustice for humans and nature alike as part of a more radical move toward geologic conviviality.
Meesters et al. (Sun,) studied this question.