Simon Rouby

Each summer, the Saharan Air Layer carries hundreds of millions of tons of Saharan dust across the Atlantic, over a distance of some eight thousand kilometers. Lithometeors takes this meteorological fact as a starting point from which to unfold its different symbolic strata.

Scientifically, this dry, dust-laden layer of air suppresses the formation of Atlantic hurricanes, paradoxically making South Florida more livable. The dust both protects and fertilizes: its phosphorus travels as far as the Amazon rainforest, where it helps replenish nutrients. In Miami, I will follow scientists from NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), in particular Dr. Jason Dunion, who has been tracking this phenomenon for two decades.

Historically, the SAL retraces the routes of the Middle Passage. Puerto Rican scholar Yarimar Bonilla reads it as a diaspora of sorts: “displaced grains of sand lifted up by the dry winds and forced into exile from the desert. Almost imperceivable in their individuality, these little specks of dust register only in their perseverance to stay together even as they are forced into far-flung lands.”

This metaphor echoes Onye Ozuzu’s work in her performance Space Carcasses, for which I am the filmmaker. In the piece, she explores how the body extends beyond its own limits into the architecture of the Black Atlantic. Buildings become a living matter that accumulates memory and is worn like a skin.

In this process, Native Maqari, whose family roots lie in the Sahel, proposed a shift from architecture to the SAL itself, understood as a structure held in suspension. This intuition led Onye to expand her inquiry to a planetary scale: a form of proprioception extending from the body to the building, and from the building to the Earth, with the atmosphere understood as a shared container.

The final work will be multiple and collaborative: a documentary essay, an installation, and a performance.

Miami is the North American landfall of the Saharan Air Layer’s eight-thousand-kilometer journey, and one of the places where it is most closely studied. On Virginia Key, NOAA conducts world-leading research, including by flying “hurricane hunter” aircraft into the heart of dust plumes.

Miami is home to some of the largest Caribbean and Latin American communities in the United States—including Haitian, Dominican, Jamaican, and Puerto Rican communities—whose ancestral routes overlap with those of the SAL. In Little Haiti, Overtown, and Liberty City, I will reach out to residents and listen to what this phenomenon evokes for them, echoing research already underway around the Harmattan in northern Nigeria.

Like dust itself, I am seeking less a demonstration than a sedimentation of stories. The residency will, I hope, be a time in which layers accumulate—interviews, scientific data, footage of the phenomenon—and my subject will no doubt shift as I follow it.

Onye Ozuzu lives in northern Florida. Together, we plan to widen our radius and also film in Savannah, St. Augustine, and Jekyll Island, as well as in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the SAL’s manifestations are woven into daily life.