This lecture-performance by Shivangi Mariam Raj reflects on the cosmologies, compositions, and materialities of dust, examining what remains after destruction. 

Focusing on India, where minoritised lifeworlds are being desecrated, displaced and demolished, where everything being flattened into debris, this talk explores how spatial markers of belonging, heritage and safety are being erased. From the sacred architectures of mosques and shrines to the intimate infrastructures of neighbourhoods and forests no space is untouched. Shivangi Mariam Raj considers how this erasure is also reordering how the community inhabits time: people are being expelled from their histories, exiled from their futures and eclipsed from their own time. 

By turning to the spacetime of dust, the talk orients us towards the relationship between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Here understood as a shapeshifter, dust is the residue of homeland, the object of devotion, the primeval unit of all life. Dust is everywhere and nowhere at once. It foregrounds lives that are treated as a spatial burden, a demographic threat, lives codified as dirt grappling with the genocidal logic of ‘cleansing’.