with kin

There was a time when quicksand was a serious threat. Relative to all those more likely risk we were warned about, quicksand had a prominence. It seemed to be a particularly fatal and plausible danger. To be swallowed up by the earth.

I wonder if that’s because it was a favoured means of eliminating characters on screen? Maybe because of its efficiency. Like, a death and a burial all in one. And without the burden of developing incentive - Ground needs no plausible motive to end us. 

As a filmic device it provided pseudo intimacy - locking bodies together in its sludge. While quicksand’s use in film has faded, its archived presence has grown. QS fans catalogue and recreate these moments - when the world’s wet cavities consume us. It gives form to the inkling that the world below our foot has agency. Or is at least, not so static as it purports to be. 

Apparently these material properties are initiated by a sudden agitation; when the water in the material is unable to escape it creates a liquified substance that loses strength and can not support weight.  I’ve tried to think of it as a diagram with arrows standing for seepage forces or gravity, but what comes to mind is an uncomfortably muscly body spontaneously deflating - instantly morphing to blubber. And so I can’t help but feel some sympathy for this ailing sand.

In a sense there is a provocation, a catalyst to this threat; the agitation of our foot. Our foot where it shouldn’t have gone, treading unchartered territory. I heard that the tide of quicksand appearances in cinema accompanies historic new frontiers; military,  astronomical, social etc. The same researcher found that the threats most vivid in the collective playground imagination today are monsters and aliens. This shift in Pop, collective fears seems to reverb ongoing anxiety politics. While we trespass or occupy new terra firma we’re compelled to narratives of terra infirm - sickly and swallowing us. Amongst all this talk of protecting our soil, reestablishing boarders, going into shut down mode; we propagate stories of aliens and monsters.

Quicksand lost its potency, it became banal stock imagery. It was debunked and it became satire. We are less dense than quicksand, which gives us buoyancy - we float - or supposedly cannot sink below the waist. There is something prophetic about this development. As we sink halfway, and exchange ironic cracks about the state we find ourselves in, rolling our eyes at the predictability of it all, the tide comes in around us.

Quicksand’s legacy has been rehashed in a new wave of kinetic sand videos. Actually, these videos invert the bottomless muddy pits which once consumed us. This sand is more compact and more solid than you would expect. The viral videos tend to show neat moulded blocks of the sand slowly hewn apart using culinary tools. ‘So satisfying’ say most comments. While the sand used to eat us, now we eat the sand.

​

>>>LISTEN >>>