Michaela Büsse – Granular Grammar

Sonic Acts Podcast

NIGHT AIR: SHIFTING SANDS Michaela Büsse – Granular Grammar 22 April 2022 – OT301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Michaela Büsse’s lecture and performative reading unearths how sand has become one of the Netherlands’ most important resources and focuses on the country’s centuries-long history of land reclamation. She will present clips from her new film that question how an industry that started out as protection against flooding has become serious business. Michaela Büsse is a Research Associate at the Institute of Cultural History and Theory, and Associated Investigator at the excellence cluster ‘Matters of Activity. Image Space Material’ at Humboldt University in Berlin. She is interested in the interplay of material practices, technologies, and geological processes. Digging into the relationship between sand, the history of pollution, and economy, Night Air: Shifting Sands featured an audiovisual work by Félix Blume, talks from scholars Jeff Diamanti and Michaela Büsse, as well as films from Enar de Dios Rodríguez, Maika Garnica, Ans Mertens and Yanjin Wu. In the latter part of the evening, artist Farzané delivered a performance of ‘LÖSS’, before DJs Femi, TAAHLIAH, Snufkin, and Europa took over for the night. More information about Shifting Sands and its participants can be found at https://sonicacts.com/archive/night-air-shifting-sands NIGHT AIR Night Air is a series of Sonic Acts events that aim to make pollution visible by bringing forth the various side-effects of modernity: from exploitation of people and resources to perpetual inequalities brought about by the destruction of the environment and common land – in other words, capitalist practices that shape both our environment and human-nonhuman relations. CREDITS Curation & production: Sonic Acts Design: Toni Brell https://tonibrell.de Video editing: Marie Debarbieux https://mariedebarbieux.wixsite.com Sound mastering: Poul Sven de Haan http://faboem.nl