El archivo del polvo

On September 11^th 2001, Elena del Rivero had been living in New York for ten years, but the attacks happened while she was in Spain. When she went back, her studio apartment in Manhattan, which was very close to where the Twin Towers had stood, was all covered in dust, ash, and thousands of pieces of paper that had blown in through the shattered windows. As she opened the front door, Elena immediately sensed, intuitively, the piece she would work on for the following months: she would sew, on a 20 x 5-metre piece of gauze, those papers that had flown to her, and she would also photograph the rubble, carry out solitary performances, and film, from her window, the work being done at Ground Zero.

This material is now part of El archivo del polvo (‘The Archive of Dust’), a startling textual and visual reflection upon the effects of war, pollution, migrations, urban and architectural transformation and how the private becomes public, and vice versa, in modern-day warfare. It is a living collage that reflects and documents a long and painful process of collective grief, which the materiality of the dust itself both transmits and impedes. Included here are texts by Pepa Balsach, Warwick Anderson, Nada Shabout, Carmen Calvo Santesmases y Jorge García García, Mateo Feijóo, Mónica Valenciano, Luz Pichel y Ophelia Maré.