Dust is the plastic memory of the world – A conversation with Alice & Ahad

The artist duo Alice & Ahad deals with energies, spaces and relationships between human and non-human beings. A conversation.

(zur deutschen Fassung)

By Elisabetta Corrà, Alice Mestriner and Ahad Moslemi

Through dust, we get in touch with time on a planetary scale. It connects us both with the communities of living creatures and with the destinies which humanity has been imposing on physical matter, energy flux and biochemical processes. “The road was teamed with growing, dry grass, aged in its dust”, wrote Andrej Platonov in his Roman “Village of New Life”. Platonov knew that dust has the power to make things older on this Planet. Otherwise, we can say that dust is a main player in our world (a subject, properly). This is why it so effectively represents the „Anthropocene condition”. It is an intermediary in the processes of fragmentation, reduction to particles, and production of particulates that besiege the atmosphere and biosphere, in secular cycles.

But in the dust, it is recognisable also a sort of upcycling of what remains of ecological destruction. It collects the remains we, as humans, don’t know how to administer and let reabsorb into the body of the Earth. Dust is composed of organic and synthetic matter, of past and present, of extinct bodies and ongoing extinctions. This is why, for Alice and Ahad, “extinction” is an inescapable component of the material transformation, which also includes the human and the world system. Human beings and the Earth System, too, share such an eternal transformation. Since dust holds the world’s past and present, it deals with the eternity of the living. So, dust dismantles our idea of death inherited from Western metaphysics (the entering and exiting of nothingness). Instead, it reveals how ecological phenomena persist along with animal species extinction one through the other.

ELISABETTA –Alice and Ahad describe PARADEISOS as a symbolic place which “keeps together new narratives and new relations, a space of creation where we’re allowed to discuss and regenerate planetary relationships between humans and not humans”. So, PARADEISOS is a territory for rethinking our stay in the world. That’s not surprising. From an ecological perspective, dust is now a global aggregator of multiple environmental crises displayed on a regional level. According to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, “sand and dust storms are an under-appreciated problem now dramatically more frequent in some places worldwide. An estimated 2 billion tons of sand and dust now enter the atmosphere every year, an amount equal in weight to 350 Great Pyramids of Giza.  In some areas, desert dust doubled in the last century”. Dust clouds interact with chemical and physical dynamics which fuel climate change, empowering the effect of warming. But dust could contain also PFAAS, the synthetic organic chemicals of industrial origin that are ubiquitous in the environment after decades of production and use in consumer and industrial applications. PFAAS enter the soil along the coastlines because they are remobilized to the air in sea spray aerosols. Plastics, too, is a component of dust. We know that the wind is teamed with microplastics derived from moquette, spray paints and textile fibres (polyester and polyamide mainly). In the western United States, wind deposits 1000 tonnes of microplastic a year in 11 national parks (protected wilderness), including the “pristine” Gran Canyon. It is not unrealistic to suppose that similar data will be sooner available for Europe, too. The dust has officially entered into the global plastic cycle. Therefore, it is a vehicle for the ongoing ecological disruptions far beyond the current stereotypes around it. Thanks to its ubiquitous presence, dust resonates with any ecological processes: decomposition, deforestation, combustion, industrial production, wind and water dynamics. But, for the same reasons, it is also a symbol of extinction: it contains what is already destroyed, yet it protects its origin and puts it in planetary circulation once again. 

ALICE / AHAD -The main question is not only what dust is made of, but, more importantly, what is its structure and composition. It brings us to consider the plastic relations intertwined in the dust: how different fragments and materials coexist. We went across Dust analyzing its concept and its plastic structures that means, the kinship of materials and fragmentary elements which originate this common-place called Dust, not surprisingly Dust is a collective name.

It’s a heterogeneous community because it gets a share only by gathering together distinctive fragments. Dust is a magnetic field where synthesis takes place. Therefore it shows us how restrictive and limited is the human language when material transformation is the case, better say Dust shows the failure of the Human Linguistic System, – the tool which has generated the layer of the man-made structure and  illusions- , but Dust exactly defeats it just manifesting its extensive and transformative structure.  The failure of language means also that language gets closer and closer to the phenomena, realizing to be exactly speechless. Humans can nominate only what is visible to the human eye. In dust, these worlds emerge unseen. Dust is a persistent state of matter’s transformations unable to be told. The fragments, the matter strength is a-linguistic, in fact doesn’t belong to humans, it is post-human, beyond human and post-colonial in its heterogeneity and a-hierarchical structure.

We call Dust the Plastic Memory the Aesthetics of Immortality of the World because it is possible to read the traces about what happened, its interactions with and in the present, giving hints for the future. Dust is gathering-Time-palace where in fact Times co-habitat. Dust records the different memories of the Earth System, it is a place of witness (organic, inorganic, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, local and global). 

This matter shows what has already done its path throughout the human language. And the second one is what is entering right now into the creative process of language. Everything is caught up in an evolutionary movement which defeats the Human concept of Death and Oblivion. Any fragment keeps on modeling its nature over time. It’s the perennial relation among gyring fragments, no matter how microscopic, that reveals the phenomenological set-up of the Earth. Any tiny element is a sediment of history which composes the planetary memory. In our view, this kind of plasticity denies the concept of death. 

ELISABETTA – So, we can say that in PARADEISOS memory works on an ecological level. Usually, the role of memory (legacy, inheritance, time) is underestimated in the mainstream discussion on the Anthropocene. Yet, in postcolonial humanity, the unfixed questions about environmental responsibility call us to face what we are akin to remembering and what we do not want to remember from our history. From a historical perspective, the essence of extinction is the manipulation of the right of persistence over time. It had worked this way for the genocide of Indigenous civilisations. In the second part of the 19th century, American palaeontologists believed that extinction created vital space for genetic lineages. Less-fitting and less-evolved races (Indigenous people) would be doomed to extinction for higher reasons, the so-called ‘racial senescence’. Similarly, animal species extinction has its role in modern industrialisation as a side effect of the unlimited expansion of human enterprise. Dust fragments are historically loaded. Any of them brings a trace of such gigantic transformations of continental ecosystems and the aggression to their civilisations. But PARADEISOS speak of a paradise. The Eden made up of our planet puts questions on the future of nature. Today, the fenced garden is the equivalent of the national park, the protected area, the fenced reserve: the last spaces where animal species have permission to room. In Africa, many accuse this conservation model of being a product of the old colonialism, whose objective is to separate landscapes from their ancestral inhabitants. Paradise turns into a reserve. In the Anthropocene condition Earth’s evolutionary potential, phylogenetic inheritance and, consequently, irreducible change have no right to be. Fenced reserves are closed by definition. I think PARADEISOS tells something completely different, and more challenging, which has not not emerged neither in the negotiation for the 30%by2030 agreement at COP15 Montreal (December 2022). You suggest that material transformation is the key to delving into the extinction pattern. 

ALICE /AHAD -Dust manifests what Anthropos has chosen to eliminate and de-form, due to a perceptual error and misreading of transformation processes. For us, Donna Haraway’s guiding principle of „staying with the trouble“ is useful for rethinking life-death dualism as well. The human being, a multifaceted system of interacting elements, is placed in a Whole of transforming animate matter. If death/life dualism had not existed, what form would human problems and concerns have taken? Today we need to see Homo sapiens as a psychedelic, pointlike and multiform fragment. He’s similar to the structure of dust. PARADEISOS highlights various ambiguities specific to the colonial system. PARADEISOS is a word of Avastic origin (ancient Persian). This word translated the image of a piece of land surrounded by a wall, a protected land, a protected garden within which negativity and death were metaphorically kept out. This is where the concept of the Garden of Eden and paradise originates: a safe, protected, idyllic and immortal place. But, if there were no transformation, including of plant and animal species, and thus the growth of flora and fauna even in these protected gardens, their fertility would not exist either. In nature, de-formation is the norm. Loss is only apparent. It is a passage toward rebirth/regeneration. Neither our “garden” is totally a protected garden.  In fact, on the upper side it is possible to glimpse a gap, an opening towards mixing, hybridization, intermingling the encounter and the clash.

ELISABETTA – You hit the point for what concerns the limits of protected areas. Even those reserves have been designed to stop the loss of nature, but in reality, they are a reductionist interpretation of nature. They freeze in a state of no-time (pristine nature) what can exist only as a product of time (phylogenetic diversity). But in our species, evolutionary history melts down into the history of Homo sapiens.  Environmental destruction enters into multidimensional dynamics with our cultural heritage. In Sulawesi (Indonesia), some of humanity’s oldest prehistoric paintings (dating back 45 thousand years) are in danger of disappearing. The fumes, dust and vibrations from a nearby mine have an abrasive effect on the painted figures. 

It is precisely this kind of bio-cultural historicity that describes human presence on Earth. Retaining the microscopic fragments of what is already consumed (the burnt particles of trees reduced to ashes by mega-fires) and of man-made substances (plastics), dust explains how the sixth extinction works. A long and troubled path, in which the legacy of the past always invents new ‚ecological niches‘ for human beings, but can only fertilise the future through human-made forms of absence and emptiness. A brutal interruption of mutual help between generations. Yet the dust that has taken over from fire, deforestation and defaunation, continues to tell the stories of humans and animals by collecting the remains and carrying away the survivors. As a collection of historically determined fragments of bodies, plants,  minerals and synthetic materials, dust is thus a vehicle of the past, of lost ecosystems,  genocides and  soil erosion. And of what will come later because there was a past in which the hypothesis of the future was formed. Dust is a collective sculpture of the Anthropocene. 

ALICE/AHAD -Following Elisabeth’s words, we would like to leave some food for thought on what it means to be alive and what it means to be dead. If being alive means having an impact on the world and being dead means having no interaction with the world, can we consider the Shadows of Hiroshima (and the nuclear dust and the dust from incinerated bodies which entered into the atmosphere/biosphere) to be dead, i.e. no longer having an impact in the world? – Moving away from mere physicality and form – are they dumb, dead beings with no impact in the world? Are they not rather screaming subjects actively part of the world? Active plastic memory belonging to an immortal aesthetic?

ELISABETTA – Of course, these shadows are alive. I would say that we can also call them ancestors, another concept limit that Western thought has now confined to the well-hidden repertoire of its fears. This is why I say, extinction has a memory. What has been annihilated, that never stops circulating as a signifier. But we have forgotten it. This oblivion is one of the main roots of our inability to think about ecological disasters. As Achille Mbembe and Eduard Glissant have shown, being alive means being in a relationship. But we can also say that being alive is not enough. It is also necessary to stay alive. It means being able to stay within the multiple relationships of the Earth System without this right passing through economic or technological transitions.