Staub

Dust. It is everywhere and ever present. A conglomeration of the finest particles set in motion as soon as things are starting to settle. It is fought and cleared away and yet returns again even as it is being removed. A Sisyphus whoever tries to defeat it. Dust nestles in carpets and in attics. It invades laboratories and settles on artworks. It is blown into the air from factory smokestacks and resides in every raindrop. Dust causes illness, dust makes up the cosmos. It is the smallest, discernable subject about which to make a film. Hartmut Bitomsky follows the path of the dust. In associative and symphonic movements, he pursues it to the place where it settles, and seeks out people who contend with it. Columns of cleaners in their daily battle for cleanliness, inventors of air cleansing products, scientists who investigate the damaging consequences of fine dust and uranium munitions from the US army’s stock of weapons, botanists, meteorologists, astronomers and artists. A culture of dust is revealed in its concrete phenomenology as a project of perception and as an area of overlap between anthropological and philosophical knowledge. Dust marks out the limits of where we can still directly experience who we are and where we come from, what we do and what we can or should be. We are never done dealing with it. Dust will not go away.