Sonic Dust

Defined by dust, smog, and smoke, California has long embraced the material, metaphor, and mobile condition that generates wholly unique engagements between beings and space. The result of factories and automobile emissions, buildings’ natural decay, landscapes marked by disaster, and the accumulation of human and animal hair, skin, and dander, dust becomes itself due to “the divisibility of matter” as Joseph Amato writes in Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible. As intricate as a fingerprint, dust’s indefinable, infinitesimal existence situates it everywhere, yet paradoxically excludes it from our perception: an omnipresent element of history that defies historiography.

Explored by architectural theorists, dust is inherently liminal as something both precarious and dynamic, a formless challenger of form. Lacking boundaries or any sense of a “traceable beginning or end,” dust’s ability to float between interior and exterior grounds exposes uncomfortable truths, according to architectural theorist Teresa Stoppani. John Ruskin insists on dust as a necessary record to maintain despite restoration practices that instead strive for a total return to a “cleaner” past, exemplified best today by Jorge Otero-Pailos’ The Ethics of Dust series of monumental castings that claim the powerful influence of the passage of time. Cultural theorist Georges Bataille similarly conceptualizes dust as an “uncanny register of time,” a haunting that can dominate space without human interaction, enveloping even Sleeping Beauty in a layer of Mount Vesuvius-caliber debris. 

As an action that simultaneously denotes removal and addition, dust’s dualism establishes it as an agent of change strikingly similar to Sigmund Freud’s conception of doubling, an unexpected semantic circularity explored by historian Carolyn Steedman. Challenging conventional logic, dust subverts economies of order from architecture’s materiality, to the binary of cleanliness/dirtiness, to a possible method for “de-in-visibilizing” matter we otherwise ignore as architect Nerea Calvillo argues for in Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds. Conceptualizing dust, smog, air, and the atmosphere as a commons of toxic subjectivities enriches a queer ecology that testifies to the intertwined relationship between beings and buildings.

By embracing dust's fuzzy boundaries, M_A Architecture Radio is soliciting proposals for audio submissions that investigate: mortality and metamorphosis, activations of topographies, maintenance work, Joan Didion’s description of Los Angeles weather of “catastrophe” and “apocalypse,” the coloniality of toxicity, mineral kinships, and beyond. Contributions must take the format of an audio file but may take on forms that include performances, essays, spells, rituals, chants, manifestos, hymns, and beyond.

Read about our contributors here and listen below or on lookout.fm

Sonic Dust is curated by M_A Programs Manager, Isabel Kuh.