GROUND TALK
Thursday, 28.05.2026, 17.30 | IfA Forum

Michaela Büsse
Granular Configurations: Sand as Resource, Medium, and Asset

In this talk, I trace how sand shifts in form and function across different contexts, from riverine and coastal systems to hydraulic laboratories and offshore reclaimed islands. Alongside these material transformations, economic and political processes intersect with geological, physical, and social dynamics, foregrounding the unstable processes through which ground is constituted.

Rather than approaching the ground as fixed or stable, I propose the notion of granular configurations to emphasize its inherent instability and the forms of work—material empistemic, and ontological—that render it either mobile or contained. Through selected fragments of my fieldwork in Southeast Asia and the Netherlands, I follow sand across sites and scales, attending to its role in practices of extraction, circulation, and territorial construction.

The talk introduces thinking with and through sand as a methodological and conceptual approach, situating granular materiality within broader debates on resource politics and planetary urbanization. In doing so, it contributes to an understanding of sand not only as a material substrate, but as an active medium through which environmental, economic, and epistemic configurations are produced.

Michaela Büsse is an interdisciplinary researcher, filmmaker, and postdoctoral fellow at TU Dresden. Her work explores environmental speculations and emerging material and territorial configurations in the context of planetary urbanization and the climate crisis. Drawing on visual ethnography and field-based inquiry, she investigates how future imaginaries are materialized—and often unsettled—through material, ecological, and technological interventions. Büsse’s work has been presented internationally in academic, artistic, and curatorial contexts. 
 
Michaela received her PhD from the University of Art and Design Linz. In the dissertation she analyses land reclamation projects in Southeast Asia and the Netherlands and develops a performative reading of urban design based on sand’s granular physics. She is the editor of Granular Configurations: Sand, Materiality, and Planetary Urbanization (2025 K. Verlag) and Limn’s forthcoming special issue “The Great Offshore.” Previous positions include the Institute of Cultural History and Theory, HU Berlin, the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures, FHNW Basel as well as fellowships with Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto, RIFS Potsdam, TU Delft, NTU/Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila, and Strelka Institute for Media, Design and Architecture in Moscow.