dust Dust is concrete’s other state, its afterlife, softened through everyday use. Where monuments aim to anchor meaning, dust disperses it, wearing it down by attrition. It loosens the ground where certainty was once held. It is inevitable. Dust moves across spatial boundaries. Amorphous and difficult to contain, it accumulates in our pores, skin, lungs, our bloodstreams, depositing the material traces of its making. Though its distribution is uneven. Dust travels along class lines, swelling most densely in the bodies that make and tear down our physical spaces. Dust circulates through kinetic spaces, collecting the traces of everyday life while also leaving parts of itself behind. In this sense, dust is not evidence of neglect but of participation: a material index of inhabitation, movement, and friction. Like memories, dust can disperse and resettle elsewhere, carrying fragments of place without promising return or completeness. Dust becomes a methodology. It allows for unfinished thoughts, partial histories, and memories in motion. And for that, I leave the last sentence open…
Charles and Ray Eames, ‘House: After Five Years of Living’, 1955
home mimicry
Home, homemaking, homeland are some of the most quintessential spatialisations of memory. Mimicry can be a material strategy to elicit feelings of belonging in a faraway home, however, these strategies can reveal what Eric Hobsbawm refers to as invented traditions – practices that appear timeless but were made in recent memory to legitimise institutions and inculcate a system of beliefs. Mimicry reconstructs familiarity, often omitting those things that might complicate it. It can inscribe surfaces to become a screen memory in the Freudian sense – projecting a hegemonic belonging by displacing bodies and histories that exceed the frame. Mimicry fails not because it is incomplete, but because it requires continual erasure to succeed. lime plaster British India’s colonial bungalows were finished in lime plaster, the same aggregate of lime, sand, and water used on indigenous Indian houses. Often, the surface was treated with surkhi , a reddish compound made from pulverised brick, carefully scored to imitate the appearance of English masonry; an attempt to stabilise European sensibilities. It is precisely here, at this intentional crack in the façade, that the building material begins to dislodge imperial claims to a homeland. The colonial house was both respite from an unfamiliar world beyond its walls and a space for shaping imagined geographies, borrowing neoclassical and gothic revival details for the façade and imported seeds for the gardens. However, the materials and construction of these bungalows were still quintessentially local in execution, standing as a liminal space between vernacular and metropole forms. The very materials that sustained this performance required continuous maintenance – whitewashing, repairing cracks, incessant watering – exposing the home’s dependence on colonised labour, structurally necessary yet spatially marginalised. Native domestic roles were reproduced and circulated through ‘native type’ postcards, where the subject is portrayed as passive, the subtext being that they, and the entire subjugated population, are impotent without colonial governance.
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard
Postcard titled Grinding Curry Stuff , ca. 1926. P hotographs of local men and women captured the descriptive typology of colonial ethnography; they were shot with blank backgrounds, whereby the rich conditions of social life were entirely effaced.
52 on site review 48 :: building materials
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