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Paper short abstract

In Romania's Danube Delta, sand dunes were targeted for extraction under Ceaușescu; a factory was built but never opened. Following quartz from geological formation to protected substance, this presentation asks what sand reveals about layered time and friction between political & geological scales.

Paper long abstract

What can a grain of sand tell us about political time? In Caraorman, a remote village in Romania's Danube Delta, quartz sand dunes were targeted under Ceaușescu for industrial extraction. This was part of a regime whose ecological violence matched its political repression, draining wetlands and building canals with forced labor. A processing plant was constructed. Then, the 1989 revolution halted everything. The factory never opened; the dunes and surrounding ancient forest remained intact. Today, the ruins sit inside a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, where the dunes and wetlands are strictly protected.

This contribution takes up the panel's invitation to think "from the ground up" by following quartz sand across temporal and political scales. Under microscopy, the grains reveal a deep history—silica formed over millions of years. Yet this same substance became the object of authoritarian industrial ambition, only to be reimagined as "heritage" by contemporary conservation regimes. The sand persists through these shifts, outlasting the polarized political projects that lay claim to it.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and audiovisual documentation (photography, microscopy, remote sensing, film), I trace how quartz moves between registers: geological substance, extractive resource, protected matter. I argue that rather than treating the site merely as a ruin, attending to the granular reveals how deep time and political time remain unevenly sedimented. The sand does not just record history; it exposes the fragility of human administrative categories—whether extractive or protective—when laid against the scale of the geological.