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From sand to glass to beads. This is a somewhat stumbling transmutation chain. The first takes place in large geopolitical spaces, the second ends at the body. All too often on the female. What both transmutations have in common is the enormous heat that must be provided.

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It is almost obsolete to mention it. But the heat needed to separate the gold from the mercury brings us back to our beginnings of our cooperation: the mercurybodies.

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granos, particulas, moléculas que se vuelven voces, cuentan historias

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Vaiven. to go from one side to another, the sand travels from one side to another, you can bury the sadness, you can dance and step on the ground many times.

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we were hiding under the sand
they searched for us day and night
time went by
little by little
they forgot us

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that happened a long time ago but the vibrations are stuck here in this stone, they absorb everything.

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the peasants displaced by the war are now arenenos. They sell sand that they collect from the river. Because of the protection of the river they are now illegal. When they work collecting the sand, they find minerals, copper, gold, silver. They try to sell these minerals to the big mine which is located at the river basin which also extracts minerals from the sand with big machines instead of body work and shovels. Who cares about sand?

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the sound of the waves is because of the grains of sand?

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Jeison, a lawyer, emphasizes that the sentence that recognizes the Atrato as a subject of rights does not correspond to the way of life of the Chocó and the black communities.... "We are miners here and the sentence is against mining in all its forms. But who here is going to be able to continue extracting gold with a pan, they have been using motor pumps for a while now, technology beyond the pan", to illustrate to me that mining is carried in the body, he showed me some videos and photographs of some women who were with their pans looking for gold inside the street under construction in Quibdó.

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Fotografía Paula OG, Ensenada de Utría 2020

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En medio de la pandemia del covid 19, a finales del 2020 caminaba las calles del municipio de Nuquí en el departamento del Chocó, un lugar donde la pandemia se vivió de una manera distinta. El turismo estaba pausado en esas fechas y la gente vivía su cotidianidad de una manera tranquila.

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Quibdó, Río Atrato 2021, Fotografía Paula OG

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In the sand port of the San Vicente neighborhood in Quibdó, it is common to find women and men working every day to extract sand for different functions.

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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feet walking on sand. gritty black sand, gritty white sand, sand as a collection of small, loose fragments of rocks, minerals and exoskeletons of marine animals, hot sand, wet sand, sand and dead algae.

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all that glitters resonates to the myth of el dorado

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what do the grains of sand that inhabit the walls of houses bring with them?
I can also feel the vibrations engraved in this body.

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This cement also fills the spaces between  brick walls. I have only recently learned that cement is extremely acidic and can corrode the respiratory tract of the workmen. But in our yard there is a very old building that will soon collapse. Because the countless bumblebees steal the mortar to build their own nests with it. And they have been doing so for decades.

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The anthropogenic dances with the grain of sand:
If we use gravity to do this, it releases the desired particles, which we then transmute into assets. If we use enormous heat, the grains of sand molecularly split and liquefy into transparent glass. Also useful for different purposes.

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Maybe the sand is more than a  substance. Maybe is not the end of a mechanical geological process? Would it be possible that the billions of microorganisms on each sand grain cry out to connect with us and infect our bodies with their stories also.
Do we know how to listen?

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The sandbox as a more or less controlled place to ingest, excrete and re-consume knowledge. contaminations and healings.

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When the crabs become robots, when they work through the sand layers equipped with sensors and circuit boards and produce countless data. Who will they serve then?

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black sand - white sand. What is hidden behind these different shadings? Cultural conventions of dominance and oppression?

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I can't stop thinking about our morning sand-stealing on this deserted sandy beach on this artificial lake in Grossräschen, a re-naturalized mining site. This sandy beach where people are not actually allowed to swim because it is too dangerous, but a few do it anyway. Because this beach serves the idealisation of a restful, idle Sunday in the sand that has been coined in the West. But this sand is not stolen from a coast . There are many sand and gravel deposits in this state of Brandenburg. And a lot of this good light-coloured pure quartz sand. And people associate it with cleanliness and purity. Why is that? For me, it conveys lifelessness and rigidity. And the heat on this morning at the lake in Lusatia almost made the sand glow.

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When I thought of the sandbox, the video game called "Sandbox" came to mind. It is a part of Zuckerberg's Metaverse that is the most developed. It is not really something new, even though it is advertised as such. It is comparable to one of those social virtual experience and event spaces that existed back in the 90s with Second Life or Hobo Hotel. They are childishly configured "play" spaces that appear to be for casual entertainment, but have only one thing in mind in a hidden way: To generate profits and develop assets.

I briefly wondered if it could be a "salvation" for all the extraction landscapes if all the companies moved their capitalist desires to the digital.

The answer is quickly given. No. Because where is the energy for the digital parallel worlds supposed to come from?

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In popular garden theories, compost is the saviour. The end of a micro-oil decomposition process that produces a fruit-bearing material. A medicine for all exploited soils. But what if the battle of the different microorganisms does not end "well" in the anthropocentric sense? When the wrong degradation processes take place? When the compost begins to rot and stink?

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Sometimes I have the impression that we forget why we think about the sand together. Sometimes it seems unclear why we imagine ourselves in, on and through the sand. We, who have such different stories to tell, such different experiences, and why we want to weave them together. Are we fuelled by the hope that the components will separate from each other, divide into further particles and eventually form molecularly different connections? With the aim of creating a special compost heap nourished by diverse situated knowledges? Perhaps our heap is too sandy, but nevertheless molecular transformations take place in it, which are processed by microorganisms. Even though we are all constantly on the move, predominantly linked via digital encounters, and even though it is always unsatisfactory when the data transfer rate makes communication and exchange fragmentary, something is emerging. And under difficult conditions. Remotely.

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Raising a child in a big city often means desperately trying to find a place where a toddler can move around a little more freely and in the company of other children without being at risk. One such place is the sandbox in public playgrounds. Mostly a quadrangle bordered by wooden beams, where parents sit and watch the children transform the sand into hills, cakes and crabs. Every now and then a parent jumps up in panic when one of the children puts a handful of sand in his mouth. You never know where the sand comes from and which animal has buried its excrement in it.
But unhindered, the toddlers work through the sand together, often adding their own impurities. The sand com-posts. A relatively uncontrolled process in a circumscribed area. Up to the point where the readings indicate that the threshold for e-coli bacteria is getting too high. Then the sandbox is dismantled or the sand is renewed.

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The crab that penetrates everything. A few more legs break the resistance of matter. They cross all the geological layers of the sand. They detect what has sedimented. There is always someone who asks how to capitalise on the energies of another. So the crabs' shells are fitted with sensors and circuit boards and sent into the endless expanses of the riverbanks. They collect data, Big Data. Even if you don't yet know what you can use them for.

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"Imagine we'd have a consciousness of history based on experience in the temporality of a stone"

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In one of the many video conferences we have had, someone had articulated the assumption that the inexorable extraction of raw materials in the rainforests of Colombia is a strategy of depopulation in order to fence in the land in the sense of a plantation era, to optimise it technologically and to exploit it without restrictions. Those who remain become part of the extraction machines and in the long run turn first into fossils that are no longer human, then into stone and finally into fine sand.
And one can then understand that the idealisation of "Becoming Stone" as promoted by Audre Lord is not honoured by all. "Becoming Stone" has become a token of liberation that proposes the perception of a very stretched temporality to heal trauma and injury.

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And this stupid imagination continues to write itself.... Let the work in the factories (and in the mines) be done by the robots, or what we think of as robots - the rest, who deserve it, lounge on the beach and enjoy their work, remotely.

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This black sand is not always familiar. It can also be irritating and threatening. Because it destroys the imaginations that accompanied the invention and establishment of the holiday in the West. And the imagination that has also shaped me is that of a perfect holiday by the sea and on a sandy beach. Every day of your holiday you immerse yourself in the pure white sand that frees the family from work and makes everyone carefree and serene. For me as a child in the 60s, it was pure happiness when the extensive Caribbean family spent a day at the beach. We all boarded the big American sleighs packed with frozen boxes of crushed ice and stopped at the Kentucky Fried Chicken drive-in on the way. My grandparents imported American jeans and T-shirts and tried to live the life of a middle class American family.
I think about whether these different ideas we associate with sand don't follow the basic principle of "shadism"? White sand perpetuates the dominance of the clean, pure and desirable. The dark is demonised and rejected?

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I lie down on the sand,
The heat of the day is contained in its grains
it quickly invades my hair, the palms of my hands, my eyes, my mouth.
It is almost impossible for me to perceive its smell
It absorbs and filters everything
It is so familiar and yet so distant

How to treat it
how to listen to it,
how to give it back care?

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Tuesday's weekly meeting of the Life Justice and Peace Commission has just ended. One and a half hours of reports on the current situation in the city. A young man killed yesterday, another person today, an explosive device in front of a school, shootings in all neighborhoods. The meeting was fast, as if carried to the rhythm of the fireworks that resounded every couple of minutes. Every couple of minutes people jumped out of their chairs and looked at each other. Fireworks? Gunshots?
I'm coming out. The river is beautiful. Going down the stairs, I catch a glimpse of the symbolic coffins used in the social mobilizations of the last two years. Beautiful river, which carries away the dead. How many we don't even know about? Carried away or sedimented in the sand?

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Sandboxes in Quibdó are precarious as many other spaces, not fixed spaces. People need sand to build houses or to transform a woodhouse into a sand-cement-house. Sand is taken out of the river and brought to the neighborhood on big old trucks, volquetas. The price and amount of sand is calculated in volquetas. That's the business of the puerto arenero, in San Vicente, a place very close to the tolerancia spot of the city, where drugs are expended.
to make sure sand is not washed away by water, people build boxes or covers it with plastic. Kids usually don't loose time to play with that sand, especially when in a box, even if parents are always alerting about possible itchy skin and because of dog and cat poop.
As the work goes on, sand disappears as well as the box. Kids go on and play in the streets, often quite sandy, too.
The same is for playgrounds. Young people create soccer fields on empty spots in neighborhoods, but they disappear in time, because land is sold and new houses built. At the entrance of Reposo there was such a field, now there's a gas station there. Where are the players? In Villa España, people fought for their soccer field to be maintained. the field is called el peladero (the peeler). It is still there.

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A few years ago, the entire Alameda Reyes in Quibdó was repaired. One day I meet Ana Inés, a neighbor from Villa España. Ana Inés was displaced from Riosucio in 1996 or 1997. In Villa España, everyone knows that Ana Inés is a little special, a little crazy, as they say. There on second street I find her barequeando in the hole of the construction site, in the middle of the city. Could it be that she finds gold underneath the pavement? Sand in the city, gold in the city. The possibility of gold in the sand. Ana Inés died a couple of years ago.

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"Young people are the future", one hears it said. No. "We want to be not only that future we do not see, we want to be that present we are seeing", youth message to the Truth Commission.
Youth is a category created to silence the movement, the changes. To say "youth are the future" means not to listen to the youth in the present. Youth as a museum piece, a zoo to be preserved for the future.
Sand. Sediments. Fossils are windows to the past.
Quibdó's sediments. Miguel working construction in his youth, pulling the pillars of the houses downtown, poorly paid work for displaced people from elsewhere. Underneath the earth, there is water in Quibdó. There are crabs.

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Night. I am sleepy. I hear fireworks in the night. Makes me think they don't scare me anymore. Strange, how the city can change so much. The fear that was in the air in August, the last time I was here, seems like a remote dream. It feels strange, that memory. Quibdó is calm.

Or rather, everyone knows that nothing has changed, but that everything is calm now. Waves that come and go. Just as I remember living here. Those waves that make you manage to live here, because after a peak you know that there will be moments of calm, to enjoy life, calm down and come back.

Memory as waves, that seem to repeat since ever...

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caracoles y cangrejos / seashells and crabs

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caracoles y cangrejos / seashells and crabs

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20 august 2013.
Coquí Beach. 27 years old, just married. The world in front. Beautiful snails.

11 august 2021. Quibdó.
In a performance with artistic collectives and the Truth Commission. Suddenly, an indigenous Embera song and dance called "Chikué", the dance of the crab. The crab rises with the tide and hides. When the tide goes out, the crab comes out again.
Just like young people in Quibdó, someone says.

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Centrifugal movement of sand in the batea
Of the sand in the cement trucks
Always in contact with other materials
With other elements

Its transformation is the measure of time
The sandclock
So light and so heavy
generates energy
Forces the constant movement
Always spiral
It is impossible to escape its rhythm in the body
Until suddenly another element sprouts up from the ground

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¿es la presa de cola de la mina El Roble también un "sandbox"?

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¿es la presa de cola de la mina El Roble también un "sandbox"?

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This is where all the mining waste, all the chemicals, all the rest, remains... afraid that with a flood of the Atrato, an avalanche will destroy the tailing dams and all the toxic waste will reach the center of El Carmen de Atrato, which is a few kilometers below. We are at the top of the mountain of garbage, its tip is flat, built with sand from the river, a small plant makes its way between the stones. It is known that there are tectonic faults in the mountain range.

Grain by grain, in the end everything seeps, fissures and looks for a way out.

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a farmer guides us along the Atrato riverbed up the mountain. Out of nowhere he picks up a piece of dark rock from the mountain wall and begins to transform it into sand with his hands and water. As he stirs the sand and at the same time filters the water with his hands, suddenly something shines. A gold ball appears in his hands. The surprise that stirs the senses at the sight of the glitter in his hands is the fever for gold? He quickly laughs and says "this is fool's gold".

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On the beach of the Bahía Solano neighborhood
mosaic intertwined

stones
scales
sand

traces
skin change
imprints
when do scales turn into sand?

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The river that inhabits me is the so-called black river. With its black sands we covered ourselves with my grandmother, with those particles that shone like stars. It was like being covered by the night. My grandmother said that this sand was good because it came from the volcano and it helped her arthritis because it was sulfur sand. That's why we came to that place.

What determines the color of the river?

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Listening to the river through the hands
Its the sand
I am hands in the sand
Decentralizing the senses
I dig a hole with my fingertips
I begin to feel the humidity
My hands travel deep through time
Eternity in a grain of sand
Everything is dislocated
My hands are my eyes
Careful, they search for depth among the friction
They seek to crush
Everything is excess when the inaudible is heard
The movement is slow and heavy
Ephemeral traces
I keep digging in the memory
I can't find the bottom
Again my hands guide me
I keep digging
Burning nostalgia
I try to freeze it
It escapes me and invades me at the same time
It's never just one
What is being separated from me?
What does each grain of sand keep in its entrails?

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Río crecido tapa todo / flooded river covers everything

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Río crecido tapa todo / flooded river covers everything

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Since I arrived, the river is huge. You can't see the beaches. The sands are covered. The river covers everything. The city is silent. Everything passes underneath. The crabs are hidden in their caves.

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Sand keeps moving and sediment settles and deepens? Does the sand become sediment?

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Arena en las calles / sand in the streets

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Arena en las calles / sand in the streets

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The streets of Quibdó are full of sand. Sand, residue of the construction of houses. The rain washes it away, it runs with the water through the streets, it is coming down from the neighborhoods, witness of what happens there every day. Will it return to its beach on the river?

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Sand is not also filtering pollutants, it is filtering and healing injustice and violence ending up in the river. The river flows and carries everything away, people use to say. Maybe it is not the river carrying it away, but the sand filtering it, cleaning it. How much is sedimented there? Is that resonating, echoing in people's houses?

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Looking at the wall of the house where I am staying in Quibdó. It seems sand. People were living historically in woodhouses, the wood coming from the forests, and now, more and more they live in houses made of cement and sand, sand coming from the Atrato. Como cangrejos en sus cuevas. Like crabs, hiding in their caves.

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Do you notice the vibration of the stone in your hand?
The resonances of sand dropping on your knee?
Miners have to reduce flying rocks,
vibration, noise, air and sand blast.
Artificial intelligence wants to optimise their blasts,
Wants to get rid of any living vibes of the rocks,
make their  business a fossilised one.
Avoiding compliance and liability.
Gush!

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a volcano stepping out the ocean
becoming land

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a cloud of data representing the sediment. algorithms looking for mineral deposits: what a strange new distribution of the sensual.
Is it a grid, is it haptic, sand blasted? A dark image of a machinic gaze -not addressed to me?

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70 years after the last volcanic eruption,
ongoing efforts
water, bacteria and micro organisms
to transform sand into soil -
this green zodiac reappeared
on the rocky, volcanic surface.
resilience never stops.

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Some are wondering why most of our life forms are based on carbon molecules and not on silicium molecules. how would these planet look like if life is based on silicium?

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cluck, cluck
Drone are taking pictures in a fraction of time.
Calculations and models within an AI  millisecond.
The million years of the rock turn
into a sand grain like data cloud
cluck cluck

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Within this mining area
the organs of a dull machine learning giant
operating with numb and greedy fingers

dozens smart drills measuring while operating.
sending data instantly into the cloud
ready for the next blast.
an frightening sensorium of tentacles,
reminding on Walter de Marias Lightning Field.

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Above me annoying autonomous vehicles  -
In order to leave my white educated patterns of thinking and feeling-
do I need divergent senses?
Senses for collective imaginations, enabling to hear the millions vibrations
a grain of sand had gone through

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This dark something a triangular mesh
a computer modelled mining site
the datapoints on the texture so dense
resembling a dark rock
Reminding me of  hundred thousand years ago lava eruptions spreading now under my bare feet.
Lava frozen within a fragment of time.
The data mesh becoming my skin.

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Safeguarding people and other life forms remote from us in other time and other space. We deeply value life. One hundred, one thousand years from now on. Countering slow violence, reimagining responsibility within geological time.
Becoming stone, drifting as sand. How deep is deep? How long is love?

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Porous Rocks
might turn into sand,
Jellyfish as violet air bubbles
long tentacles.
Jellyfish bubbles might become solid.
petrifying an island,
nobody  anymore dares to move or touch the waves.
Toxins that paralyse, kill.
Are the bubbles the floating mirrors,
the antennas of stones?
Look closer,
Do you see stones?