I have a habit of collecting things I find on the floor: papers, screws, coins, insects… In my collection of scraps, I keep a plastic box where, over the last few years, I have gathered dust and other small things that the fluffs haven't let go.
Their origins are diverse: they come from my room, from other people's places, from studios I have been to and from places where I have exhibited. I have accumulated them in the same box without any order, as they all share more or less the same qualities: an indecipherable composition and a turbulent greyish colour.
Once, I heard another artist say that Santiago is the capital of dust, and although I have never lived for long in another city, I completely agree. In my apartment in downtown Santiago, it is enough to leave the windows open for a day so that a thin layer of dust covers all surfaces, like a faint veil that marks the passage of time, with a lightness that even complicates the possibility of referring to it.
Marcel Duchamp kept his unfinished work The Great Glass in a warehouse for a long time, and it was there that Man Ray took the famous photograph Dust Breeding. In it, the layer of fluff on the glass looks like a landscape in itself and the image loses all scale, resembling an aerial shot of the crops we see when the plane is about to land.
Man Ray was the first to popularize the “photogram” or “rayograph” technique among artists of the time. The method is simple: objects are placed on photographic paper, the light is turned on and then the paper is developed. The results are also simple, showing the shapes of the objects through their outlines, in black and white, light and shadow.
I am not very sure why I decided to collect dust, nor am I interested in its provenance. However, some ideas have persisted over time. My practice is largely based on observing the ground; with my eyes down, I walk through the places I inhabit and try to understand them from there. The ground is the first and last place, providing stability and security to all matter. I believe that something similar happens with dust, as we have heard thousands of times: “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return”, “We are nothing but stardust”, “Time turns everything to dust”, and so forth.
Dust represents what we do not wish to see, and yet we cannot stop producing. I am collecting a substance usually considered peripheral, a life that is hardly recorded, a life that tarnishes, but that is substantial to any human settlement because we are great producers of dust. Our contribution to the ecosystem is to vacuum it.
Clarice Lispector said, “Dusting is not a mundane activity, but a philosophical act. It will always return, no matter how often you clean it. Dust is eternal."
I like to consider these images of dust as intimate landscapes. A substance made of everything but resembling nothing, something similar to what happens to us when we see our own reflection in the subway doors, in a dog's eye or a spoon. When the mirror fills with dust, I am the one who becomes that - dust - because I can only see it when my image fills the emptiness.
Watch out! Even the faintest needle can transform the mirror into the simple image of a needle.
Pedro Albertini, artist.
June 2024.
