Saharan Dust
Creative research on weather, culture, and borders
"When dust from the Sahara Desert drifts en masse towards parts of mainland Europe, skies become saturated with ochre hues and surfaces require dusting." – Sabin and Jorge Olcina Cantos (2024)
Saharan dust is a creative engagement with a weather event and form of air pollution that happens when particulate matter from the Sahara Desert is transported by winds to far off places, including Europe. The photographs below document traces of Saharan dust during a research visit to the climatology laboratory at the University of Alicante in February and March, 2022. The grainy quality of some of the photographs and the sepia tones reflect how the mineral dust transformed transformed the appearance of atmospheres and surfaces.
As a result of the visit, I co-authored an experimental article with Jorge Olcina Cantos. 'Weathering Saharan dust beyond the Spanish Mediterranean Basin: An interdisciplinary dialogue' (2023) attempts to bring cultural studies into conversation with climatology. The dialogue explores how weather stories of Saharan dust as a border intrusion are typically told from a Eurocentric perspective. We speculate about 'drifting with dust' and its ability to dissolve b/orders, moving towards decolonial weather stories and contexts of African air quality in relation to transcontinental flows of capital and energy.
