Festival of Future Nows, 2025 – Jeewi Lee x Phillip C. Reiner

Fragment-Proximity_Sa-Ràpita_23-41 presents a single sand grain from the coast of Mallorca's Sa Ràpita, one of a global collection from coastal locations across the world. The sculpture presents the grain, enlarged about a thousand times, as revealed by nano-CT scanning and 3D printed in sand, making tangible a surface that is normally invisible to the naked eye, and making the microscopic detail of geological processes legible at monumental scale. Fragment-Proximity_Sa-Ràpita_23-41 plays on sand's paradox: a metaphor for infinity that is also a disappearing resource. Globally, we consume some 50 billion tonnes of sand each year, and the angular particles required for construction are becoming scarce, even as desert sand, rounded smooth by wind, remains structurally useless for all its abundance. The grain from Sa Ràpita carries with it traces of Mediterranean geology, its surface recording the history of erosion and transport that it has undergone. It was shown at the Festival of Future Nows in 2025, the third edition of the festival, which returned to the Neue Nationalgalerie after earlier iterations in 2014 and 2017, among a hundred international artistic positions of performance, installation, and participatory work.