التربة (soil, ground, earth, dust, land)

The dust of the walls of my mother’s hut, for the dark putrid dust of the underground, for the dust that will disintegrate my bones when my breath has become air and the dust on my brothers inhale.

With the pivot to digital architectures, this film collage was written, conceptualised and made in Johannesburg, at home on a desktop, during the lockdown of 2020.

It continues the unpacking of one of Counterspace’s longest research projects centring dust—the intentional and violent application of dust used in the malevolent statecraft of the Apartheid government. As a tool for the slow disintegration of the physical black body alongside the slow dismantling of the black mind through the separation from the soil that makes belonging and the connection to ancestral knowing.

The film weaves together sounds, stills, archival footage, news media and drone footage, tracking the travel of dust in Johannesburg. While also acknowledge the charged nature of breathing, renewed with the pandemic.