Souvenir Stand

Sand Story excerpt. See the whole video at sandstory.online

Souvenir Stand is a social sculpture designed for Ocean Beach in San Francisco. Souvenir means to remember. This project wonders at what we remember and how we can cultivate a sense of geological empathy? Each souvenir here commemorates 1 place in the source to sea journey of the sand that makes up the land I live on in San Francisco. As the Sierra Nevada mountains erode, sand swirls downriver, making it’s way over millions of years to the San Franciscan peninsula, by way of the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers. This long slow story makes up the place where I live and this project is an act of companionship and memorialization. Through this work I seek a sense of deep and empathic knowing for the slowness of the geologic.

The stand features native Dune tansy grown at Literacy for Environmental Justice; portable dunes with sand from the Friant Dam in Central Valley; concrete mountains made of recycled skyscrapers and mountain dusts (by way of a concrete factory in Bayview),  an artist book, and hollow rock backpacks for walking and memory-sharing.