The talk will share field encounters in our on-going journey of Tracing Sand in Southeast Asia. It is a pilgrimage of two architects trying to reconnect with the fundamental matter of what is around us: the concrete foundation, the lime mortar on the wall, and the window glass all made of sand that came from rivers or land in one way or another. By extension, architecture comes from the earth in one way or another. We follow sand as a guide to unpack the coming-into-being of iconic sites—their form and materiality, the energy that keeps them running, and how they enter the societal cultural imaginaries. Rather than an investigation of direct causality, Tracing Sand traces entangled relations through fieldwork. To us, understanding these relations, not in the abstract, but through tangible, specific registers and embodied experiences is paramount. The talk will wrap up with excerpts from our long-term situated project, RIPPLE, RIPPLE, RIPPLING, a transdisciplinary endeavor that tunes into how Chinese rural migrant workers make worlds. Traversing different contexts, the focus remains on the entangled flows of people, life forms, matter and the built environment to unpack the interconnectedness and interdependency of our time.