A few weeks ago, a dust storm hit this city lasting for a few hours. The storm engulfed the cityspaces—its streets, buildings, skies and, trees—by creating a kind of veil that hazed what was happening around us. In March, things seemed a bit settled with the global pandemic when we had announced the open call for this edition saying ‘Dust could be witness to the events that unfold in a place, carrying the stories of that place and its people with it.’ Little that we knew what was about to happen—the trauma, the grief, the vulnerability that would swamp us and how that’d impact us so deeply that it’d hang over us forever. As the scattered dust particles in the storm in this city obscured the surroundings, I wondered how these dust particles affected us—literally as well as metaphorically. What are the stories that these dust particles would carry?  And, most importantly, can we look at the idea of dust from a different perspective?

The challenge in front of us was to keep going while carrying the burden of the surroundings upon us and finding relevance to what we do. As we were still grappling with the nightmarish situation around us, we went through the submissions we received for ‘Dust’ edition that produced moments of silence and contemplation for us. As we coped with the feelings of loss and grief, we realised that one of the ways to understand them was by looking at it as traces or residues. These residues became carriers of stories, memories and experiences.

These residues or traces are carried forward in the form of telling and retelling of autobiographical narratives. Sarba Roy’s intimate account of his own experiences ‘Reading Residues’—a testimony to certain events—is inexplicable, yet, these memories have left a strong imprint on his mind. The dust is constantly present in this narrative, as a remnant of his memories and as a witness to the testimony. In another piece, reflecting on the complex nature of ethnic conflicts in the Sri Lankan context, Pramodha Weerasekera expresses her discomfort over ‘settling of dust’ by asking, “Why does dust settle? Is it because we forget? Is it because we stop caring?” This settling of the dust creates a feeling of unsettling.

In a way, the physical form of dust connects such personal stories or everyday experiences. The formless, shapeless dust neither remains an abstract idea nor an intangible entity. The layers of dust are formed within a particular geographical space carrying elements from its surroundings—the people, their practices, the fires, the smoke, the eroded soil, the quality of water, the trees and the pollutants. It occupies both the spaces—the outside and the inside, the public sphere and the domestic space. Two personal narratives by Paromita Patranobish and Nilofar Shamim Haja connect the idea of dust with two spheres respectively: in the public realm the presence of dust denotes industrialisation, movement and, the cycle of creation and destruction, whereas in the domestic realm the dust becomes a metaphor for the carrier of ‘outside’ filth, the so-called impurities of that life that exists outside.

Although dust acquires its meanings from cultural practices and societal taboos, we fathomed various new readings and meanings during the process of making this edition. As you can see, some of the artists have conceived the idea of dust as amalgamation of spatial and temporal realities. Dust turns into ‘material’ in their creative process. In Shubhangi Singh’s series of visual work, dust becomes ‘data’ or a ‘proto-archive’ that is re-contextualised and re-presented to provide us with clues to the past occurrences and present activities. Similarly, Sareena Khemka’s sculptural objects made from collection of dust generating from organic as well as industrial materials make us ponder on decaying urban ecologies that are, as  she writes ‘regeneration of these ruins into contemporary relics; not to place them in the pathos of the nostalgia of lost time but rather create new objects and landscapes using them as markers for what remains.’      

Moving away from the physical form and space, Sonam Chaturvedi’s intriguing proposition makes us think about the residual collection in the digital space in the form of caches, pixels, cookies and trash. Thinking through the digital dust, the piece also makes a case for accumulation of dust as slowing down of time which inversely acts as a sign for challenging the idea of constant digital presence. Perhaps. For her, the digital and physical spaces collapse into each other creating a fissure that represents our fragmented existence. The current pandemic situation has enhanced this experience creating these fissures in our daily lives. Dust, digital or physical, represents the creation of these fragmented realities around us.

Dust participles capture space and time. They are about tactility and temporality as they may carry feelings about a particular place or time or memories of a person or location. They are unpredictable and unreliable. They are about forgetting or inattentiveness as well as about murkiness and ambiguity. They represent stagnancy as well as movement. Dust could turn into haze and murkiness, but it could also turn into luminous glow. There are multiple ways to understand this miniscule, yet all-encompassing element. For us, the idea of dust has amplified and intensified through different stories, reflections and representations. Through the making of this edition, we came across myriad ways in which one could understand and present ‘dust’—a veil that I witnessed in the beginning has acquired multiple meanings over the last few weeks. Yet, one wonders what we would encounter once it’s been lifted. This edition, like our previous ones, is an attempt to discover what lies beneath the surface.