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Collapsing Clouds of Gas and Dust
2014-2016
Mineral Crystals

Dust is soil. Dust is pollen.
Dust is burnt meteorite particles.
Dust is also hair, tears, blood, sweat and shed skin cells.
Sites of history are heavy with dust.
They attract us with the weight of this dust, this debris.

Collapsing Clouds of Gas and Dust is comprised of artworks that are based on dust. It stems from an understanding of dust as “remains” —as material index of human and non-human activity that is continuously formed and accumulated by and on objects, bodies and spaces. It identifies biological debris in dust and examines the relation between dust and memory, as well as monumentality. The iteration of the project features artworks that deploy chemical procedures in order to synthesize the archaeological and narrative strands of information, ossified in biological debris, into artifacts that become, in their turn, material ciphers waiting to be decoded and recombined. The project proposes the act of memorial—or monument- making, as fundamentally an act of delineating the space of remains to be deemed significant and worthy of preservation or commemoration. Monumentality, in that sense, inheres not in scale per se, but in the space delineated by the dust created over time, thus making the memorial or monument a structure that indicates the locus of the historical and material “weight” that has accumulated—settled—over time.

In this project I collect biological debris from dust accumulated in sites of memory and transform them to crystals. Sites include memorials, monuments, landmarks and sites of pilgrimage, like Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai, Pałac Kultury i Nauki in Warsaw (Palace of Culture and Science) Barakat Building in Beirut (Beit Beirut Museum) and Zamzam Well in Mecca.