DUST
“There can be no true beauty without decay.” (From Bruce Robinson's 'Withnail & I')
This work uses the concept of the archive as a means to explore memory, decay, and impermanence within both our interior landscape, and the actual physical landscape. The work considers how climate change has transformed notions of time and permanency; and how temporal traces can be recorded and felt within a landscape.
In its rawest sense, an archive is about the preservation of something physical in time. The colonial perspective of an archive is entrenched in notions of categorization, definition and removal: that in order to preserve something it must be extracted and contained. At the opposing end of this idea is the perspective that the landscape itself is an archive in which is stored eons of history, memory and knowledge.
In the words of Ross Exo Adams: “If landscape is an archive, then our interventions into it can become the making visible of the richness of its historical evidence; like a well-cut ice core, it must draw us into the past, narrating the unfolding of the human and non-human relations layered into the ways in which landscape now speaks in the present.”
‘Dust’ explores the entanglement of science and empire, and uses the concept of the archive, in all its forms, as a basis for reflection into the understanding of permanency, and the ephemeral nature of human life.
