Nicole De Brabandere

Dirt and dust are processual substances—dirt holds the relation between sanding, shedding, accumulating, cleaning, flowing and blowing in tension, activating openings for emergent patterns of movement, thought and attention. From the intense volume of particles, individual flecks become streaks as they are informed in the flow of gravity, while single grains innervate into all-enveloping atmospheres as they disperse into air, and into breath, and form a granular coating on the skin and surrounding surfaces. Particulate textures activate dynamic tensions between the singular and the voluminous, as well as between dimensions of containment and dispersion. What is particularly relevant about the dispersive tendencies of dirt is that it renders textures that filter and infiltrate between ecologies of cleaning, growing, flaking. The dust bumps, grinds and scrubs in fumy layers where new intensities begin to resonate, between lifting and landing or between smoothing, clearing and obscuring. Below I elaborate how specific ecologies involving dirt and dust activate emergent form through the indeterminacy of particulate textures and the corresponding potential for thinking and feeling with the inhabited and durational dimensions of corporeality.

Proposition: pour a volume of dry, sieved dirt into a fine, plain-woven cotton bag and tie off the end. Lift the bag slightly and tend to how the tightening threads exude the wafting powder that saturates its fibres and passes through its striating weave. Feel for the difference between skin, air and the woven threshold of containment and release, before you notice the grainy film that now coats the skin. When fine dirt passes through coarsely woven cloth, it fills out the fabric form until the striating threads render a potential directionality other than form of containment, such that it's surface exfoliates in the slightest agitation or opportunity for compression and release.

The plastic surface agitates a heap of fine dirt as it tightens and relaxes under changing air pressure and the changing weight of the bouncing volume. The grains gently elongate diagonally over the plastic skin, reverberating the form of the caving plastic surface in the lifting and jumbling particulate collisions. The contour holds at the limit between form and dispersion, between the incessant lifting and landing of its own weight. The bouncing rhythm draws powder contours by shivering volumes, between contour and surface, in jumbling, multi-sidedness. As volumes of dirt turn in on themselves, they activate an intense and fleeting resonance between the surface of the plastic sheet and the contour of each particle. These underside or inside movements, exhaust and recombine tendencies of recognizing the relation between surface and form, as well as cause and effect, activating a virtual dynamism that is in excess of frame sequence.

Ping-Pong balls exhale thrusts of pressure against the table's fine coating of dirt powder, leaving perfect circles of clear green. The visible flow of steam and vapour in the wind sets the pace for the game, sets the pace of continuous play. This atmospheric consistency coincides with an intense duration of particulate dispersion, but also rules of the game that sustain a rhythm that allow for emergent alliances between the table surface, the boundary co-ordinates, the moving surfaces of paddles and the dimension of the net. The excess becomes audible as passing waves of gaining roar, dispersing the discreet moment of impact in audible durations of ebb and flow, between surface and atmosphere.

The even dirt coating sticks over a damp, porous piece of paper. Water saturates the paper from the underside as a layer of water from a spray bottle impacts surface at regular intervals. The moisture gradually permeates through to the other side, rendering an even gradient from dry to damp. At a certain threshold the dirt can no longer absorb and the surface can no longer sustain in the weight of moisture-saturated dirt particles. The dirt surface eventually releases from the soaked paper, a process that seems to accelerate as the surface of mud drips streaks that fold over themselves with baroque abandon. The intense coincidence of paper fibres and the particulate tack of dirt dampens and is replaced with the transitional threshold between the flow of powder and water.