A narrative of dust in its mutable forms investigates and it, itself, gets caught in a symptom. Forms shed their properties becoming contagious: an avalanche razes a populated residential plateau; spontaneous combustions erupt in both a people’s assembly archive and a national theatre, in the countryside a home-bound train catches fire, all at once. Objects, normally bound within their own being--whether a human body, concrete structure, a digital image--are observing, and may perform the behavior of the other, possess its actions or qualities at will. Seemingly orchestrated yet attributable to none, it is as if the mere anarchy of witnessing, can cause an accidental, uncoordinated collective event.

Keyword Searches for Dust was written in the wake of a series of fires in Cairo in the summer of 2008.

About the Filmmaker

Malak Helmy (b. Alexandria, Egypt, 1982) is based in Cairo, and her art focuses on video, text-based works, and collective initiatives. Much of Helmy’s video work visually references the new cultural and architectural constructs of her native Egypt, disputing their too-easy claim on reality and seeking a truer center for psychical meaning. The rhythm of her videos emulates that of desire, but the pathos of the work is of desire left waiting, as time—and its trappings of expectation, language, will—is suspended. With this deft poetry, Helmy’s video art succinctly and beautifully encapsulates the haunting liminality that defines this historical moment, in Egypt and everywhere.