Nehal El-Hadi

Nehal El-Hadi is a writer, researcher, and editor based in Toronto. 

Nehal holds a PhD in Planning from the University of Toronto, where she studied the interplays between material and virtual spaces and the ethics of using archives of user-generated data. This scholarship led to a residency at Toronto’s Theatre Centre, where she’s developing a public space performance that considers the impacts of surveillance technologies. Nehal has taught university-level courses (both graduate and undergraduate), curatorial writing workshops, creative research methodologies, and place-based writing. An environmental and science journalist by trade, Nehal’s research and creative practices explore the relationships — between people and materials, technologies, and places — and how they influence, inform, or alter what it means to be human.

Nehal’s current research investigation focuses on human-sand relations, and considers environmental, ecological, social, political, economical, and poetic examination of the material. Her output includes public talks, co-editing the sand issue of Material Intelligence, an immersive virtual reality experience called Haboob, and a shadow puppetry production titled Ramla and the Desert.

Between 2019 and 2025, Nehal was the editor-in-chief of Studio, a biannual print magazine dedicated to contemporary Canadian craft and design. There, she showcased the work of Canadian makers, artists, and designers, and supported and promoted Canadian craft nationally and globally. 

Nehal’s writing has been published in artist catalogues (most recently British ceramicist Magdalene Odundo’s A Dialogue with Objects), exhibition texts, anthologies, edited collections, academic journalistic, and magazines. She’s also written scripts for film and theatre, as well as produced for podcast and audio projects.

This project examines Black life through our connections to sand, advancing a radically interdisciplinary approach. Over the past seven years, I have drawn on media, scholarship, environmental reports, film, art, and popular culture to map relations between sand-as-matter and Black life. The work integrates my lived experience as a Black, Arabic-speaking East African woman, my professional training as an environmental journalist, and my formal education as an urban planning scholar.

Communicating environmental crises demands narrative complexity equal to the economic, ecological, sociopolitical, and geographic entanglements of places, materials, and bodies. Here, sand is the object of study, research methodology, and creative poetics. I move between sand as material and concept. 

With varying compositions constituted from broken-down rock, minerals, and organic matter, sand is a size category rather than an actual material — larger granule sizes of the exact same composition are categorised as gravel, smaller granules are silt.

Sand is one of the most plentiful resources on Earth, and yet we are running out of sand that is easily extractable. Global urbanisation drives the demand for sand, and its extraction is causing considerable environmental damage, the destruction of ecosystem, and the exacerbation of climate change impacts.

Sand geographies — deserts, beaches, waterbeds — are sites where extractive urbanization remakes livelihoods and where border militarization weaponizes landscapes, as in the Sahara’s vast, deadly migration corridors.

Sand is ubiquitous — we all have memories of sand encounters — and represents a geological archive. It is a material that is ephemeral, to be broken down into smaller granules, or transformed into city or circuitry. It is the material that constructs our worlds, facilitates our technologies, and mediates data.

nehalelhadi.com

instagram.com/iamnehal

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While the GEEX team has closely reviewed and corrected the transcription, it may still contain errors. Please direct any questions or comments to [email protected].

VIEW TRANSCRIPT AS .PDF

Transcript

NEHAL EL-HADI:

Hi everyone. My name is Nehal El-Hadi, and I’m a writer, researcher, and editor based in Toronto, Canada, where I live on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the 

Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. I’m really excited to be here today and have an opportunity to talk about my research on human-sand relations. And that’s sand: S, A, N, D. 

NEHAL EL-HADI:

I’d like to say thank you to GEEX for inviting me and having me here as part of a community of brilliant thinkers, makers, and writers. I’m going to make a really grandiose statement right now, but I promise you, all back it up. I believe that sand is the material that matters the most to what it means to be human. 

EMILY LEACH (VOICEOVER):

GEEX, the Glass Education Exchange, welcomes Nehal El-Hadi to the GEEX Talks lecture series. Stay tuned for a special guest from Hastings College later on. Thanks to Wet Dog Glass for sponsoring this episode.

[music]

NEHAL EL-HADI: I’m going to let you know a little bit about me, just so that you can situate me in space and time and in relationship to my research. I was born in Khartoum, Sudan, and raised between there, London, UK, and Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. I’ve been in Canada for about 25 years, most of that time in Toronto, but I’ve spent a couple of years in Moose Jaw and Regina in Saskatchewan, and those are places I still go back to quite regularly. I note my personal geographies because they shape, influence, direct, and inform how and why I conduct research. 

NEHAL EL-HADI: I’ll talk a little bit later on about a research methodology that I look at that looks at where I’ve been over time and how it informs my research. Specifically, in this case, looking at sand encounters and memories.

EMILY LEACH: This season, GEEX Talks will explore “Material Life Cycles: Sand, Glass, and Practice”. This episode begins with a biosketch, followed by an overview of Nehal’s research, an exploration of the material intelligence of sand, various artistic collaborations, a chronogeography, works in progress, a question from the community, a Studio Tour, and a lightning round of questions.

BIOSKETCH

NEHAL EL-HADI: As anybody who’s moved around a lot in childhood knows, you’ve learned very, very quickly that you need to adjust to different ways of being based on where you are. I’ve had to contend with different ways of understanding the world around me. Different geographies mean different climates and topographies, and it also means different languages, cultures, traditions, and ways of being, and all of these different things inform different relationships to objects, places, temporalities, materials, and technologies. 

NEHAL EL-HADI: Of course, all of this is filtered through my experience and how I’m perceived in the world as a Black, Arabic-speaking, African, Muslim woman, how I understand the world is also shaped by my professional training as an environmental journalist, my academic scholarship in urban planning, my work experience and explorations into writing and research and craft and my own creative writing practice. My research is about making sense of the world I live in and the relationships that I have with places, objects, materials, technologies, other people, knowledge systems that inform how I am to be and how I am seen in the world.

NEHAL EL-HADI: I have this grandiose meta-question that guides my research. It’s my three-minute elevator pitch, but this really lofty question that looks at or runs through all of my research and my research projects, is, how do our relationships with places, technologies, materials, other people, non-human and more-than-human life, inform what it means to be human? To study this, I use relational methods. If history and recent events have taught us anything, it’s that our understandings of the world are constantly changing and that there are many, many different versions of the truth, finding meaning or understanding can only be achieved by developing our capacity to both produce and understand complex narratives, to account for historicity, to relate to context, to counter misinformation and decades of oversimplification, reduction and erasure in the media narratives that we are fed, relational methods deepen how we study, investigate and make sense of the world, and in turn, how we communicate it. 

NEHAL EL-HADI: In my work, I often refer to narrative complexity, which I define as the ability to provide historicity, highlight connections, convey context, and suggest implications. To me, narrative complexity is both an understanding and a communication, and it assumes the political positioning and opposition to the tendency to optimize, reduce, abstract is still, simplify, and condense. Narrative complexity requires research methods that can acknowledge and solicit multiple knowledges, that can contend with various canographies and futurities, that can complicate space, site, location, scale, and that can account for paradoxes, counterintuitions, and inherent tensions.

RESEARCH METHODS

NEHAL EL-HADI: My approach is strongly influenced by the Haitian literary and aesthetic movement Spiralism, defined by poet and artist Frankétienne thus:

NEHAL EL-HADI: “Spiralism defines life at the level of relations, colors, odors, sounds, signs, words and historical connection, positionings in space and time, not in a closed circuit, but tracing the path of the spiral so rich that each new curve wider and higher than the one before expands the arc of one’s vision in perfect harmony with the whirlwind of the cosmos, the world of speed in which we evolve from the greatest of human adventures to struggles for liberation. Spiralism aligns perfectly in breadth and depth with an atmosphere of explosive vertigo. It follows the movement that is at the very heart of all living things. It is a shattering of space, an exploding of time.”

NEHAL EL-HADI: What I’m showing here on screen is a flip-through of Material Intelligence, a magazine by the Chipstone Foundation, which I co-edited with Glenn Adamson. There’s some articles in here that approach sound from different ways, from sandpaper to the use of sand tables in war. Sand is so rich, and it gives me so much, and I will never stop thinking about it. There’s a story by Borges called “The Book of Sand”, and it’s about this monstrous book that the protagonist gets a hold of, and the book is infinite, and he can never find the same page twice, and the numbers change, and there’s weird symbols. And he keeps on exploring the book until it becomes this overwhelming obsession, and he finally realizes that he needs to stop, or it will consume him totally. That’s how I feel about my research, is that it’s so infinite. There are so many different ways to look at and explore sand that it’s sometimes overwhelming to figure out and focus on it.

NEHAL EL-HADI: My research on sand over the past seven or eight years draws from media coverage, scholarly research, policy papers, documentaries, artworks, popular culture and at this point, conversations with scores of people, I locate and describe the relationships between the environment and Black life, using sound as a material and metaphor, I gather and work from various aspects of my identity as I draw from my lived experience as a Black, Arabic-speaking, African Woman, my professional training as an environmental journalist, my education as an urban planning scholar, my creative and artistic practices and my experiences as a craft writer and researcher. I explore sand as matter and material substance and concept: thing and non-thing.

NEHAL EL-HADI: Sand itself, however, is all and none of the above. What sand actually is, is a size category of granules, and the size category shifts depending on which standard is being used. So sand itself is an invention, an idea, but we all know what it is. Sand lends itself to such slipperiness because of our associations with it, because of its earthly ubiquity, sand encounters are a universal experience. Most, if not all, of us have some kind of familiarity with sand including body memory. Sand is an archival material broken down from larger formations, and the sand itself is broken down into something smaller. If we’re categorizing a smaller granule as silt, there is a temporariness and ephemerality to each grain. 

NEHAL EL-HADI: Sand can consist of broken down rock, minerals and organic matter, and beyond being insoluble, its chemical properties depend on its constitution, which in turn, varies depending on its source and location. Inland silicon, in the form of quartz, is the most common constituent, while along shorelines, calcium carbonate from ancient life is prevalent. Sand is used to build cities, develop technology and in countless industrial processes, the most suitable sand for construction comes from coastal and river and areas because of how the sand is formed there.

NEHAL EL-HADI: Recent media headlines have raised the alarm about how the world is running out of sand. But that’s not true. What we are running out of is easily extractable sand. Future sand extraction will be more difficult, expensive and destructive. Sand is, in our human temporalities, a non-renewable resource. Sand is the material we associate most closely with time, both physically through its presence in hourglasses, and metaphorically in the land. Which in expressions and idioms related to times passage that we use, such as footprints in the sand, or sands of time in English, sands influence and language can be seen on how it is connected to creativity, courage, conflict and cowardice through sandboxes, grit, arenas and burying one’s head in it. In Arabic, the Arabic word for sand, raml, is used to describe a specific meter in poetry. Sand, geography, deserts, beaches, water beds have specific and well-documented ecological, environmental, economic and sociopolitical entanglements. Sand sourced from beaches and water beds is most suitable for construction, and its extraction has damaged communities contributed to coastal erosion and flooding sand geography, like deserts, become weaponized through the militarizations of borders.

NEHAL EL-HADI: In 2022, I delivered a lecture for the New York based environmental advocacy group Slow Factory titled: “Poetics, Politics, and Paradoxes of Sand.” In it, I explained how thinking through and with sand is both haptic material and useful metaphor through which we could grasp the complexity of our contemporary challenges. In that talk, I said, 

NEHAL EL-HADI: “Poetics: because sand infiltrates our languages and desires. It’s the material we associate most with temporality. Poetics: because sand is beautiful, is made beautiful and can make beautiful. Politics: because sand’s movement around the world and our movements on sand are established, controlled, and determined by states, markets, and paradoxes. A paradox is something that contains two opposite things that happen to be true at the same time, like sand is plentiful and we’re running out of it. A grain of sand is minuscule, but sand can shape mountains and build worlds. And the metaparadox: sand does build our worlds, but our demand for sand is destroying the world.”

MATERIAL INTELLIGENCE

NEHAL EL-HADI: Glenn Adamson writes about material intelligence as a form of human knowledge built on literacy, knowledge, and understanding of a material or object. I’ve devoted almost a decade of my life to trying to understand our relationships with sand, and the more I discover, the less I know, which sounds like a cliche, but also the more I learn, the more I am convinced of the material intelligence of sand itself. Years ago, when I started writing about and observing craft and makers, I was initially surprised when I heard craftspeople talk about listening or paying attention to the material they would ascribe what I had considered to be human characteristics, stubbornness of metal when it didn’t want to assume a certain shape or form, the temperamental nature of ceramics. Now, these craftspeople had a high level of material intelligence about the material that they chose to work with but what, to me, was implied in how they spoke about it was the materials agency. I started wondering if material itself could possess agency, and I came across the writings of archaeologist Lambros Malafouris. He wrote that:

NEHAL EL-HADI: “Agency is a property or possession neither of humans nor of non-humans. Agency is the relational and emergent product of material engagement. It is not something given, but something to become realized. In short, as far as the attribution of agency is concerned, what an entity is in itself does not really matter; what does matter is what it becomes and where it stands in the network of material engagement.” End quote.

NEHAL EL-HADI: One of the historical uses of sand is in geomancy, which is a form of divination that reads the Earth using sediment, sand, or soil. Diviners, who use geomancy reveal knowledge by scattering handfuls of sand or reading patterns in it. They use it to predict the future, to find out information that they wouldn’t have access to. In Arabic, geomancy is called ilm al-raml, or knowledge of the sand. It’s an ancient, ancient pre Islamic practice believed to have been taught originally to Ancient Egyptians by the prophet Idris, who, coincidentally also taught the Egyptians how to build cities. When Islam arrived, ilm al-raml became forbidden, along with other divinatory and oracular practices that led to what’s called Al-Ghayb, or knowledge of the Unseen. Interestingly, the algebraic patterns and symbols that originated in ilm al-raml inform divination in contemporary Malagasy sikidy and West African practices in the Sahara. 

NEHAL EL-HADI: In the Sahara, the sand, with few local exceptions, is composed of pure quartzos. To me, it’s not a stretch to infer that the original material of geomancy, historically, was silicon dioxide, the same material found in computer circuitry and what glass is made out of. Now, sand itself is an archival material broken down in larger formations. It contains the Earth’s geological memories. In her beautiful essay, “What the Sands Remember”, Vanessa Agard-Jones writes: 

NEHAL EL-HADI: “Ever in motion, yet connected to particular places, sand both holds geological memories in its elemental structure and calls forth referential memories through its color, feel between the fingers, and quality of grain. Today’s sands are yesterday’s mountains, coral reefs, and outcroppings of stone. Each grain possesses a geological lineage that links sand to a place and to its history, and each grain also carries a symbolic association that indexes that history as well.” End quote.

NEHAL EL-HADI: I’m fascinated by this relationship by sand’s historical alchemical connection to knowledge as keeper of geological memory as medium of revelation, and this relationship continues into our present moment. And I’m struck by how sand continues to do what it does, this time as silicon chips and glass as circuitry and interface. 

NEHAL EL-HADI: Sand’s oracularity is, as Malafouris puts it, the relational and emergent product of material engagement. I said in my introduction that I was going to make this grandiose statement about how sand was the material that matters most to be human. We have no idea who we are without our technologies.

COLLABORATIONS

NEHAL EL-HADI: So I’m going to talk a little bit more about the relationship between sand, knowledge and technology in a little bit. I’m going to do it through the work of Shirin Fahimi’s Ilm Al-Raml series, which is this beautiful exploration of digitality, gender, myth-making, and geomancy. I’m also going to talk about two collaborative projects that I’ve worked on. The first one is called Haboob, which is a retelling of a body memory I have of sand in my childhood. The second project is based on Borges’ Imaginary Beings, and it was a commission from Public Visualization Studio here in Toronto.

NEHAL EL-HADI: I’m going to talk about Shirin Fahimi’s Ilm Al Raml project. And I’d like to start off by thanking Shirin, who continues to allow me to talk about this work and present on it in different spaces. I was connected to Shirin by a mutual friend who said, “Hey, you’re researching sand. Shirin has got this amazing project that you should be aware of.” And I came across and I was like this beautifully synthesized so many different things that I’ve been thinking about in such a lovely way. So I just wanted to say thank you to her. I’m using these images with her permission, and for more information about Shirin Fahimi or Ilm Al-Raml and her other work, you can visit her website at shirinfahimi.com.

NEHAL EL-HADI: Shirin was born in Iran, and she’s currently based in Ontario. I’m going to read from her bio right now, but: she investigates the colonial dichotomies of rationalism and superstition, as well as the ways in which women negotiate visibility in the political arena of Islamic societies through digital world. Making her research is influenced by Islamic mysticism, literature, and magic in Iranian society and diasporic communities. Since 2016, she has developed her practice into a body of multimedia installations, performances, and an extended reality series based on the Islamic method of divination called Ilm Al-Raml, known as geomancy. And I’m just going to play the first little bit of a video of Shirin’s work. It’s called “Tracing the Dots.”

NEHAL EL-HADI: So the dots and lines that you see here on the screen refer to the different patterns that are revealed through geomancy. In an interview that Shirin did with Mara-Johanna Kölmel, she said:

NEHAL EL-HADI: “It became important in my work to revive such sciences and ways of knowledge making, which have been dismissed as irrational or superstitious in the contemporary era. Like some other divinatory methods, ilm al-raml is based on binary codes, one and zero configurations, in which it systematically defines and divides space, time, and material. I immediately became interested in the link between the digital technology methods of prediction versus the ilm al-raml divination. How would our understanding of time, space, and material differ in the digital environment if we use ilm al-raml as technology?” End quote.

NEHAL EL-HADI: Shirin poses this question, and the way in which it leads into my research is how I’m interested in the use of sand as a material through which she explores geomancy and its use of sand to how, again, sand figures in the technology that she uses to interpret this ancient practice. She then chooses to use virtual reality and digital world-building as a way to explore this ancient, historical… like sometimes malign practice, she brings other elements into it. But my concern here again is with the material aspects, and then what happens to sand when it is a physical material, as opposed to when it is a digital or virtual material? And this leads me into my own work. So one of the questions that Shirin’s work provoked for me was, what does it mean to take something that is so haptic and tangible and material as sand and to represent it digitally? 

NEHAL EL-HADI: Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a huge fan of science fiction, and I do have a particular relationship to the Dune books and films. They have been critiqued for their colonial enterprises, but the films remind me, as Edward Said wrote, that the Orient has helped to define the West as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. We are what they cannot be. And nowhere are those fantasies and desires as explicit as they are in Dune. The setting for Dune is Arrakis, a desert planet with no precipitation. There is a long history of obsession with deserts that assumes that they are empty, inhospitable, unconquerable environments. This is completely untrue. In the latest Dune franchise movies, sand screens were used instead of blue or green screens. One of the sand screens used was a 360-degree ring that was 25 feet high. To film Dune, 18 tons of real sand was used in production because of the difficulties of recreating sand digitally, there were wind machines to blow it around a twelve-foot vibrating square to film the movements of sand worms. And the reason for that is it requires an incredible amount of computer power to produce or to represent sand visually, grain by grain.

NEHAL EL-HADI: Now I’m going to preface this by saying that I conducted this research before the release of Sora 2, a few weeks ago, and I haven’t explored that kind of AI visual representation, and don’t know what the environmental costs of it will be. But, historically, representing sand and its movements digitally has taken a cost-prohibitive amount of computer power to render. For Dune, the sound special effects team used Houdini animation software, and they worked with the developers to customize the program’s tools to render sound for the film.

NEHAL EL-HADI: So I am going to play a clip from a virtual reality experience that was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in New York Life Arts and was presented as part of Quills Fest. It’s the first iteration of a virtual sandstorm, and is based on my memory from when I was a seven or eight-year-old child in Khartoum.

KENZA RUSSELL (VOICEOVER): Usually, everyone takes shelter. Cars pull over. People head indoors. They take their animals with them. But even the strays get ghosts. It can be dangerous to move around in a haboob. The blowing sand reduces visibility. I don’t remember if I snuck outside or if I was forgotten outside, but I remember being surprised by the silence. 

NEHAL EL-HADI: I worked with creative technologists and artists, Ayodamola Okunseinde and Salil Parekh for the visuals, tUkU Matthews at the vocals. For this project, we were really challenged with how to represent the movement of sand in a digital environment. We had to use fire and smoke plug-ins to represent sand, which completely changes the visual representation and the interpretation of it. But as you can see, the figures moving around are made out of fire, or digital fire, and the movement of the sand in the air, we had to use smoke filters for now, this is an immersive world, which is why you can see those arches in it. What’s above them would be directly overhead, if you’re looking at the sky. We turned a weather phenomenon, a sandstorm, into a being, and had an interpretive dancer recreate the sandstorm’s movements. The audio is a first-person text that recounts the experience of a child being left outside in a sandstorm. I should mention too that I wrote the text based on my own memory, but it’s my daughter, Kenza Russell, who’s reading it.

NEHAL EL-HADI: So this project was a commission from Public Visualization Studio for Nuit Blanche in Toronto, also in 2022. 2022 was the year of VR and AR for me, for some reason. They’re not mediums that I work in very often, just because of accessibility purposes, not everybody can see it that this commission in particular was based on Jorge Luis Borges book of imaginary beings. They wanted to do an updated presentation of mythical creatures. And so I was commissioned, along with a bunch of other artists, to invent a creature for this project.

NEHAL EL-HADI: And what I ended up inventing was a creature called a kuthbani. A kuthbani is a creature that is made out of sand that lives in the Sahara, they belong to the world of the djinn, which is a parallel universe made up of a different kind of matter. Kuthbanis are shape shifters who gather sand to assume any form, and when they’re at rest, they appear as shifting sand genes in the desert. Kuthbanis can only be seen by and form relationships with people who know how to communicate with the djinn, but they are innately curious about humans and seek out the ones that they can relate to. They are said to be playfully mischievous with magpie tendencies, which is why you shouldn’t leave your stuff in the desert, because you might not find it again. They are said to predict the future, making it highly desirable to befriend one several kuthbanis can combine to form large and more powerful sand dunes, which, when agitated, become a haboob. And haboob is a specific kind of sand storm. That was the creature that I was commissioned to design for this project. And as you can see, the same problem or the same challenge that we had, we had to use different plugins to approximate the appearance of sand.

NEHAL EL-HADI: What I liked about this particular commission, or what I enjoyed about it, was that it was a way to think about sand that wasn’t based on this empirical, rational approach. It was a way to explore mythology and history and lineage and connection. And it was a different application that I’d mentioned before that I was trying to some environmental and science journalists, and that’s very much about the facts and what you can see and what you can observe and what you can prove. And so this felt like a much more playful exercise in applying knowledge to something that’s completely fabricated.

CHRONOGEOGRAPHY

NEHAL EL-HADI: You know when you come across something that just completely shifts how you think about absolutely everything? Like: it’s a question that gets asked that just gets to the very core of you. In her book “Code Noir”, the poet and writer Canisia Lubrin asks the question, “What does it mean to speak as if the world you know is the world?” And it’s such a beautifully evocative question, what does it mean to speak as if the world you know is the world, and it’s one, it’s like… I think about that question every day, and I try to figure out how to answer it. What does that mean? And all I can say is that I can only talk about the world that I know. I can only talk about my own experiences.

NEHAL EL-HADI: But now I do it from a position of understanding that this world I know is mine and mine alone, and that I cannot assume other people’s understandings. I cannot assume that I understand other people’s worlds in the same way. And it’s… it’s a question that erupted and unfolded in so many different ways of trying to locate myself. It also challenged me, and it made the ground under my feet a little bit less stable. Such a beautiful question.

NEHAL EL-HADI: When I conduct research, I talk about the importance of narrative complexity as a way to counter reduction, simplification, and erasure in the stories that we tell. I also said that in order to generate narrative or to produce narrative complexity, you need relational methodologies. But what did those methods actually look like in practice? And one that I use is like, I call it chronogeography, which is the study of space over time. The word chronogeography comes from ancient Greek words “Chronos”, time; “Geo”, earth; and “Graphia,” writing. It’s a research approach where I visually map out where I was at particular moments in time, and I use this to identify patterns or to jog my memory or to just help me contextualize how I think about the work. This is a really simple and simplified timeline of my positionings in space over time.

NEHAL EL-HADI: I was born in 1979 in Khartoum. In 1981 or 82, before I had any kind of memory, my mother and I moved to London, England. In 1986, we moved back to Sudan, but in between there, that’s not mentioned, I would visit my father in Denmark quite a bit. In 1990, after the military coup of 1989, my family left Sudan and moved to Oman, where we lived in Muscat. Six years later, I went back to London for a university. Four years after that, I ended up in Saskatchewan, Moose Jaw and Regina, and 22 years ago, I moved to Toronto, where I’ve been ever since. This is a really simple, very easy starting point to work from. Usually, I do this by hand, because it gives me a lot more place to play with but my handwriting is practically illegible to anybody but myself, and so I typed it up.

NEHAL EL-HADI: So you can see where I have lived over time. And then I’ve put some moments where I remember sand. I was a child, and I went outside once in the middle of a sandstorm. That was a very significant moment, and I would say one of my early strongest sand encounter, memories living in Khartoum and being surrounded by desert. You hear a lot about the desert being mentioned and its mythology, and about people being lost in it, or people crossing it, or people living in it. In Sudan, we spoke Arabic, and so sand figures in our poetry and our language. It was also at some point in there that I read The Little Prince, which talks about sand and desert and existentialism and relationality. So during that time, I watched Star Wars, and there’s another desert planet there, Tatooine, that figured really prominently in my sci-fi imagination. In Sudan, we would sleep outdoors a lot, and there wasn’t a lot of light pollution back then. So you could look at the stars all the time. In Sudan, I also come from a very tribal culture, and can trace both my mother’s and father’s lineage, both of who crossed the Sahara. My mother’s family from the East, my father’s family is from the West. 

NEHAL EL-HADI: Then, as mentioned, when I lived in Muscat, it was at the very edge of the Arabian Desert. We were on the coast, but the Empty Quarter, which up until that point, I had read about in science fiction or travel logs, was somewhere that was hours away by car. Never visited it, but I was very aware of its geography. Also in Muscat, we became a lot more familiar with desert wildlife, and that we would be out playing with friends, and we would have to watch out for scorpions. If you left shoes outside or containers outside, you’d have to shake them out for snakes. You could hear the wild desert dogs at night. Again, there was also not a lot of light pollution. We didn’t sleep outdoors there, but the sky was very present, in a way that it only can be in the desert. Now I say that, but in Saskatchewan, the site, the skies are pretty incredible, too, in a different way. I read Frank Herbert’s Dune at that moment in time, family trips, we do day trips and picnics at oases. So you’d see these interruptions in the desert and how beautiful they were. Wadi bashing is a pastime where people would take four-by-fours and drive really fast across wadis, which are dried-out river beds in the desert. 

NEHAL EL-HADI: When I went back to London. Now, this didn’t really register to me at the time, but I do have recollections of the sand barges that were on the Thames and sand would be dredged and just placed on these floating platforms to get collected or towed to where they needed to go.

NEHAL EL-HADI: When I graduated from university in London and moved to Saskatchewan, I went back to university there to do a degree in journalism, and because I had an undergraduate degree in science, I ended up studying science journalism, which led me into environmental journalism. I also started writing poetry, and in Saskatchewan, I also became a lot more aware of mining, and the reason for that was because driving between Moose Jaw and Regina, there are mines and processing plants on the way, and they’re visible in a way that hadn’t been to me before when I lived in the city. After that, when I moved to Toronto, I went to graduate school, did my Master’s in environmental studies, where I looked at environmental risk communications, and did a PhD in urban planning.

NEHAL EL-HADI: The confluence of those two programs of study lay in material extraction and the building up of cities. And that was one of those moments where I was like, well, where, what are cities made of? And they’re made out of sand, mostly a lot, and where does that sand come from? Because you need a lot of sand to build a city. And becoming aware of the ways in which Toronto’s topography had been shaped by sand mining. And then later on, I found my way into the world of craft and became interested in material studies, and all of these connections and sound just kept on showing up, again and again and again, led to this project that I’ve been doing now for a few years. Using this method helps me map everything out. It helps me see connections or repetitions in different ways.

WORK IN PROGRESS

NEHAL EL-HADI: So, for my current work, I’m going to talk about two ongoing projects, and I’m going to tease one that’s been on the back burner for a little while, but there’s a reason why I’m going to bring it up. The first project I’m currently in residency at Tarragon Theater in Toronto to work on a shadow puppetry project called Ramla and the Desert. And the title screen you see here, it says Ramla wal Sahara, which is the Arabic translation of the title. Ramla means sand, but in this case, it is the name of a little girl. It’s a fairy tale style story that came out of me trying to emotionally process, rationalize, and make sense of desert disappearances. I’ve been researching desert borders and became aware of the scale of migrants and refugees disappearing in the Sahara. There’s a documented border control strategy where states will use the desert and weaponize it to stem the flow of migrants.

NEHAL EL-HADI: Deserts can be very hostile environments, but also when people unfortunately die in the desert, there is usually very little trace remaining because of the sun drying out the bodies, animals eating the flesh away, sand, moving and covering them over. If you can’t count people, you don’t have to account for them. So it’s a documented border control strategy which weaponizes the desert to disappear people trying to cross into other countries. The southernmost borders of Northern African countries are militarized in this way. Now the Sahara Desert crossing for migrants has been called one of the deadliest crossings on record. I was finding out all of this information and reading UNHCR reports and looking at work by advocates and researchers who examine desert border crossings in the Sahara in the United States, in the Sonoran Desert, and trying to make sense of it, and trying to really understand the scale and the scope and the kind of decision-making and policy that informed this approach.

NEHAL EL-HADI: And then the war in Sudan broke out, and what had been this academic study of testimony and documenting and other people became really, really personal, and I didn’t know… I didn’t know how to how to process it, or how to make sense of it, or how to understand it. And to be honest, I still don’t, but Ramla and the Desert came out of that. And it was a friend of mine, a while ago, who had said to me that fairy tales emerged out of trauma, and this is a fairy tale, like story that did emerge out of trauma. I mean, not my own, but out of a traumatic event that keeps on happening to people over and over again. 

NEHAL EL-HADI: So Ramla and the Desert came out of this grief, anger, despair and guilt and overwhelming helplessness. It’s a story of a young girl who’s in the desert with her family. She comes from a loving home, and one day she wakes up and finds that her whole world, her parents, her brother, her belongings, have all disappeared. She goes off to look for them, and in the story, the truth is revealed to her. So I am the writer and producer of this tale, and we’re using shadow puppetry because it’s an accessible, simple, beautiful and evocative way of storytelling, but also one that has a tradition and history and references that greatly inform the telling of the story. So here is Ramla. This is an earlier version of Ramla with her family in the desert. It’s a live animation, shadow puppetry, in case you were wondering about the mechanics of it. This is a two-person manipulated puppet, so you have to coordinate with somebody else in order to get her movements really fluid.

NEHAL EL-HADI: So I’m working on this project with Heather Piper, who’s a phenomenal human and incredibly gifted puppeteer, designer, creative and artistic director. Ramla is directed by Mabel Wonnacott, who is also an incredible human being and an opera director based in Toronto, and the music is being composed by Waleed Abdulhamid, who’s a Sudanese multi-instrumentalist, also phenomenal human being, because that’s the only people I work with, but who’s incredibly talented and tapped into the work and the energy that this tale needs. This is really interesting to me, because I’ve never spoken this much about a project while it’s been in production stages. I have this is like, this is our first rendition of the puppets, and we’ve just started world-building, so I have no idea where this is even going to end up. I’ve never been so transparent and open with this process. This is very early stages. We’re now in residency at Tarragon Theater in Toronto. We’ll be presenting the work in Toronto at the end of January. We’re hoping that we’ll have many different forms of presentation, whether it’s live puppetry or recorded animation. The hope of it is that it draws attention to the plight of migrants in the Sahara, which also gives people a way to contend with grief and loss.

NEHAL EL-HADI: So the second project is called The Observer Effect. It is also in residency, this time at the Theater Center in Toronto, and it’s a public space speculative fiction piece that looks at the future impacts of surveillance and AI on racialized youth. And I’m talking about this one too, because in when I was looking at world building, the environment of the performance, one of the things that was really interesting was when we talked about cameras and screens and all of that is: how would they figure in the future? And cameras operate in a particular way. You need glass, you need lenses to capture visuals, how you record and store it has changed over time that the the eye, the lens has not or has changed nowhere near as radically as the storage medium, but the interfaces seem to be going a little bit more glass-free.

NEHAL EL-HADI: It’s a project that’s being developed in residency. We workshopped a performance last year, which was really exciting, like it takes place in public space with no barrier between stage and space or performance in everyday real life and. And I’m currently working on another iteration of it, which is an audio recording that you can only listen to at the site that’s intended to that sorry at the site that it’s occurred in so and then this work comes directly out of my PhD, which looked at the work of women of color, social justice activists across physical and virtual urban spaces. That’s me in the corner. So the two, the two other people… are actors in the performance. The woman sitting next to me as an audience member. So you can see how closely this is an actual stage presentation, a workshop presentation. So we had audience, like an audience there.

NEHAL EL-HADI: The project that I teased earlier on, that is currently on the back burner, is on fire, and the reason that I’m bringing it up today is because Erin O’Connor, who wrote “Firecraft”, is going to be doing a talk as part of the series as well. A while ago, I was invited to respond to an exhibition by the Toronto-based artist Tim Whitten called Elemental Fire, and I was invited to do so because of his work in glass and my work in sand, and fire being the translational thing in between both of our works. And so in responding to his work, I’d always been taken by the Prometheus myth, which tells us that fire was stolen from the gods and given to humans as an act of defiance, but also the fire that Prometheus stole came from Hephaestus Forge, which means that it was always a generative fire, a fire that was made to produce or create or transmute matter. So obviously this relates to my work on sand, which is a mundane, everyday material with metaphysical properties, if fire is the element that has determined and enabled humanities direction.

NEHAL EL-HADI: Sand is a material that matters most to what it means to be human. Without sand, our cities and technologies would be something that we can’t even fathom or imagine. Without fire, sand couldn’t achieve those. Sand is also one of the materials that provides access to collective knowledge, that reveals the unknown and the yet to come. Sand and glass act as a portal for parallel worlds and future events, you know, like the looking glass, like glass is a portal. In researching fire, I came across these really cool images of fire burning in an orb-like shape, when it burns in zero gravity. On Earth, flames rise up countering the downward pull of gravity as heated air molecules push the flame upwards in space. Experiments in fire show that flames burn and creep slower. And there’s also a bizarre fire behavior called flameless fire, with flames that are invisible to the human eye.

NEHAL EL-HADI: These continued revelations about the nature of fire reinforce its enigmatic and mythic nature, and I like to imagine that fire learned how to behave differently when it was brought down to earth and had to contend with a heavier gravity. I was at Haystack in June 2025, and there I interviewed craftspeople about their relationships with fire: metalsmiths, jewelry makers, ceramicists. And I was amazed at the extent to which working with fire is such an intimate process, and it’s a really all-consuming sensory experience. I haven’t personally experienced that, but I know that a lot of you have and know this, and I’m not telling you anything new. I’m still looking forward to learning more about makers’ relationships with fire. I don’t know where this project is going at all. It is extremely early stages. I don’t even know what I’m doing with it, and I’m so excited to listen to Erin’s talk and hear more about embodiment, complicity, and human, non-human relationships through her perspective. 

AUDIENCE Q&A

JESSE CHARTIER: Hi, my name is Jesse Chartier. I am from Lincoln, Nebraska, and I’m currently studying at Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska. And my question was: what have you learned about people in the community as a whole through your research on sand?

NEHAL EL-HADI: I really like this question. So thank you so much, Jesse, it was really great to take some time and think about the different ways in which I have interacted with people through this research project.

NEHAL EL-HADI: First of all, whenever I tell people that I research sand, there’s always an offering in return. They tell me a sand story about one of their personal encounters with sand. They tell me a random sand fact from their part of the world. So it becomes this really, really lovely way to interact with people and gather their stories, and everybody has something to say about sand, so it’s a brilliant conversation starter.

NEHAL EL-HADI: Second, through my research, I’ve collaborated a lot with artists and craftspeople and makers, from puppeteers to creative technologists to illustrators, and what that has then has helped me learn more about sand as a material in and of itself, and how to relate to it as matter and material. But it’s also pushed my ways of thinking about this project too, and it introduced new ways of… of encountering and engaging with the material and trying to understand it and to work through it.

NEHAL EL-HADI: And then, thirdly, there’s something really beautiful about the poetics of sand as a metaphor for collective action, what one grain can do, as opposed to hundreds of thousands and millions of grains. Like one grain can be an irritant that could provoke a change or can stop a movement, can create friction or resistance, and many grains collectively together, that’s a sandstorm. That’s a weathering, that’s a heat, that’s a dune.

NEHAL EL-HADI: And so… yeah, thank you so much for that question! 

STUDIO TOUR

NEHAL EL-HADI: This is the studio tour part of the talk, which is super interesting because I’m a writer, so I don’t technically have a studio. All I need is a surface to put my laptop on, but this is where I work out of most of the time. This is my little studio dog, Tulip. She’s a five-year-old Shih Tzu/Yorkie mix. And this is my bookcase, because I’m a researcher, and I have a lot of books. Have I read all of them? No, but I have read a good deal of them, and the rest represent potential knowledge, because I don’t really have tools or a space, and it’s not really very interesting to be like, here’s my laptop where I do my writing.

NEHAL EL-HADI: I’m going to talk a little bit about the books that have shaped my thinking, that have given me tools and frameworks through which to understand the research that I’ve been doing. One of the books that is most relevant to my research practice is this one “Ready to Burst”, which is by a Haitian painter, novelist, poet, Frankétienne, who unfortunately left us earlier this year. It’s translated from the French by Kaiama L. Glover, who did this brilliant, beautiful, haunting translation of it. The reason that I reference this book, which is a novel, is that it provides a definition of Spiralism, which I had talked about in the research methods part of my talk, but it’s given me a framework through which to examine relationships and relations between different objects of study and so it’s a really, really significant text for my research practice at large.

NEHAL EL-HADI: Specifically relevant to my work in sand is a book by an environmental journalist, Vince Beiser, called “The World in a Grain.” This one right here. And this is a really great overview on the role of sand and its extraction in global urbanization and the destruction that its extraction creates. And it’s about how sand helps us build our world, but our demand for sand results in this destroying parts of the world too.

NEHAL EL-HADI: Borges’ book, “The Book of Sand”, which is a short story about this… this magical book that the protagonist gets a hold of, and it’s an infinite book, and no two pages of this book are the same, and so he becomes obsessed with it, and keeps on flipping through it and exploring it, and spending all of his days trying to trying to encounter the same page again, or trying to figure out the mystery of the book or how it works, until It becomes this monstrous obsession, “The Book of Sand.” It’s called that because of the infinite nature of sand. I have been researching sand for about eight years now, and I can see like how sand infiltrates my dreams, sometimes my thoughts, my exchanges, my interactions, how people know me as a sand lady, how my kids are like there she is talking about sand again, and in this book, just the story provides a really great parallel. 

NEHAL EL-HADI: Another essay by Italo Calvino, “Collection of Sand.” That’s the first essay in this… this collection of his essays, and it’s about how he attended a conference where the theme was collection, so people would collect different items. And he encounters this woman who has a collection of sand, which was the most mundane, and yet he found it the most intriguing collection. In this collection of collections that he attended, one of the things that appealed to me a lot about research, and I see it too in… in the culture and theory that I consume, is when something ordinary is made extraordinary through examination, and that… that essay does that his curiosity, how he’s intrigued by this collection of sand. Why sand? What does it tell us? 

NEHAL EL-HADI: Oh, here’s another one. This book is “The Physics of Blown Sand in Desert Dunes.” It was first published in 1941, republished in 1954, and this copy that I have was republished in 2005. It is the definitive work on how sand behaves. And one of the very, very first things that I learned about it is that people reference sand waves and sand ripples, but sand doesn’t move like a liquid at all. It has a very particular kind of physics, and so it’s really intriguing. And the book has become a lot more popular with sand exploration on Mars, so I’ve been seeing more and more references to it recently.

NEHAL EL-HADI: “Sand: The Never Ending Story”, which I take as a starting point for my research in the ways in which Michael Weiland, who wrote the book, talks about all of the different ways in which we relate to sand and my research looks at the ways in which we can understand many of the challenges that we’re facing right now, through sand, through using it as material and metaphor, as concept, as framework, as relational material, and specifically how it underlays an understanding of Black life in the world today.

NEHAL EL-HADI: And then finally, here is a text that I really love that’s edited by Samia Henni, “Deserts Are Not Empty.” I’m really intrigued, obviously, by the Orientalist notion of what a desert is like, this empty space that refuses to be conquered. And yet I have always known and understood deserts to be filled with life and history and culture, and—at the risk of romanticizing it—magic, and yearning, and desire.

LIGHTNING ROUND

EMILY LEACH (VOICEOVER): Alright, Nehal, this is the lightning round of rapid-fire questions. Are you ready? 

NEHAL EL-HADI: I have no idea what to expect, but let’s do this.

EMILY LEACH: How would you describe your work in three words?

NEHAL EL-HADI: Granular, material, complex.

EMILY LEACH: How about three emojis?

NEHAL EL-HADI: [laughing]

NEHAL EL-HADI: One of the face going… [makes a shocked face] That one. The desert one. Is there a desert one? I think there’s a desert. There’s got to be a desert one. And then the emoji of the person sitting at the laptop. 

EMILY LEACH: Do you have a go-to comfort watch?

NEHAL EL-HADI: Fast and the Furious. What’s the point of narrative? Just show me a PowerPoint slide with what I need to know for the next action scene, and we can all move on. Like people are like, “It’s an action movie!” And I’m like, “No, no, it’s magical realism.”

EMILY LEACH: Name a new-to-you artist that you’re currently interested in.

NEHAL EL-HADI: Kris Rumman. Yes, I really, really liked her work, especially what she did with the spices. Kris is looking at and addressing the complex and complicated nuances of being a person of the diaspora and contending with the existence of multiple geographies in one body.

EMILY LEACH: What do you wish you had learned sooner?

NEHAL EL-HADI: Oh, my God, so many things. Thinking takes a lot of time. It takes so much time. And I was trained as a journalist, and you don’t, you don’t think much as a journalist. You observe and you record your observations, and you put some kind of narrative. And if you’re working in news, that’s very, very tight deadlines. And so it’s a very particular way of thinking. But for this kind of writing and work, I need time more than anything else. The other thing that I wish I had known, but I also don’t know, how you… you get to know it without time, is that a lot of it doesn’t matter. It’s more important to do the work and not… not worry about how perfect it is, or to be self-critical only insofar as it will improve your work, and to learn when the moment is that self-criticism becomes damaging rather than improving.

EMILY LEACH: What’s a skill you’d like to add to your toolbox?

NEHAL EL-HADI: I would like to learn more languages. I am fully bilingual in Arabic and English. I will not die in French. [laughs] And one of the things that being able to operate fully in Arabic and English has given me as a different frame of reference for understanding the world. And I wish that I had fluency in something else, whether I mean I said languages, I’d love fluency in additional languages, but also fluency and understanding or working with a material, fluency and understanding music, for example, like, I don’t play an instrument, just something that gives me a different mode of thinking that I’m comfortable in, that gives me something else to compare and contrast my experiences. 

EMILY LEACH: What institutions or spaces foster the thinking essential for your practice?

NEHAL EL-HADI: Ooh, my friend’s kitchen tables. Like, you know, when you’re just hanging out, and you’re talking, and they’re like, what’s on your mind? And you’re like, Well, I’m working on this, and they respond to it. Just spaces where I feel really comfortable and open. There’s a lot of critiques of institutions, especially institutions of higher learning, but I think that what these spaces do is that they bring people together who are interested in the same thing. And so while it may not happen in the institution, it does happen because of the institution of what it has fostered. But for right now, it’s my friends, homes, and public talks.

EMILY LEACH: Best sand moments in pop culture?

NEHAL EL-HADI: For the 2024 Met Gala, Tyla wore a dress for Balmain made out of sand, and she carried a purse that was an hourglass. And it was in direct reference to the Sands of Time. And it was just this beautiful, highly impractical dress that she had to be cut out of later on. But it was just a stunning sand sculpture, and in my dreams, I get to have a conversation with [Olivier] Rousteing and ask him, “How did you make this happen? And why did you like, how did you design it, and pull it off?” So that’s a pop culture moment. And… and the amount of people who sent me that dress? [laughing] …Was also pretty amazing.

NEHAL EL-HADI: I have another sand pop culture moment, though.

NEHAL EL-HADI: So, it’s Anakin and Padme having this conversation in “Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones”. She starts talking about remembering her childhood on this island that they’re at, and how some of her fondest memories were spending time on the beach. And it’s like it’s a beautiful scene that she that she sets up, you know? In response, Anakin says, “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere.” Now, Anakin grew up on Tatooine, where he was living this life of indentured servitude, and it became this way of like… This class difference between them magnified in that she got to go to the beach, and it was pleasurable. And those are her memories of sand where he grew up with this horrible, rough, challenging existence on the desert planet where there was sand everywhere, and it was just like a visceral reminder of his… of his rough childhood.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

EMILY LEACH: Thanks for joining!  If you enjoyed this lecture, check out previous GEEX Talks episodes featuring Dr. Chitra Ramalingam, Kris Rumman, and Charisse Pearlina Weston — exclusively available for subscribers in the GEEX Talks Archive. 

EMILY LEACH: The GEEX Talks lecture series features artists and researchers nominated by a community of glass educators, artists, and learners. For anyone seeking their path in this field, GEEX offers you a record of predominantly BIPOC and queer fine artists, craftspeople, scientists, historians, designers, community organizers, and more working with glass in traditional and unconventional ways.

EMILY LEACH: At its essence, GEEX is a grassroots project that has been bootstrapped together by a community that believes in the importance of this effort. Accordingly, GEEX relies on subscriptions, partnerships, and donations to make our public programs possible.  GEEX Talks subscriptions are available to institutions (like colleges and universities) and individuals outside of academia (whether graduated, self-taught, or curious about glass). You can subscribe or donate to GEEX by visiting geex.glass/support.

EMILY LEACH: Many thanks to institutional subscribers for believing in the GEEX Talks project! Speaker honorariums are drawn from a pool of subscribers and supporters. Support for GEEX comes from viewers like you and makes all of GEEX programs and resources possible, including the GEEX Writing Center, BIPOC Community Table, Flame Affinity Group, and GEEX Educators Group. 

EMILY LEACH: Thanks, as well, to our organizational partners. Organizational partnerships are intended for craft schools, glass schools, museums, cultural institutions, art service organizations, and truly all organizations interested in enriching their resources outside the bounds of their walls.

EMILY LEACH: This season of GEEX Talks—specifically the GEEX Shorts format—has been supported by the Wisconsin Special Projects Grant from the Ruth Foundation for the Arts. The Wisconsin Special Projects Grant aims to build a robust and equitable arts ecosystem by investing in initiatives that rethink and reimagine past practices, bring an expansive range of voices into public and artistic discourse, and contribute to a more complex and abundant understanding of the histories, lived experiences, and futures of this region. GEEX is based in Madison, Wisconsin, the birthplace of American Studio Glass. With the support from the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, GEEX reconnects Wisconsin’s glass history by revitalizing the narratives that define the field in a rapidly changing market, academic, and professional landscape.

EMILY LEACH: Thanks to Wet Dog Glass for sponsoring this episode! In business since 1996, Wet Dog Glass delivers unsurpassed value and turnkey hot glass studio equipment, studio planning and consultation, and technical support. Wet Dog Glass: your studio’s best friend. Visit their website at https://www.wdg-us.com/.

EMILY LEACH: You can follow GEEX on social media @geexglass on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Sign up for our newsletter to learn more about upcoming programs and events.

EMILY LEACH: Thanks to Jesse Chartier from Hastings College for participating in the Q&A!  Many thanks to Nehal El-Hadi. And finally, thanks to you for listening, sharing, and supporting GEEX Talks. Stay tuned!

BACK TO TOP