Charline Kopf

In West Africa, dust has emerged as a key object of environmental governance — forecasted through satellite models, linked to health risks, and folded into climate security infrastructures. Yet dust is not only a pollutant or climatic variable. This project investigates how dust is measured, governed, and contested across West Africa and the Sahara–Mediterranean corridor, approaching it as both material and memory: a medium that circulates across bodies, infrastructures, and political imaginaries. Through ethnographic fieldwork at Dakar’s national meteorological agency (ANACIM), air quality center (CGQA), and satellite initiative (GAINDESAT), along the Mauritania–Senegal borderlands, and at Barcelona’s Dust Regional Center, the research traces how Saharan and industrial dusts are differentiated, modeled, and politicized. It asks who owns the instruments that track the air, how standards of pollution are defined, and how West African scientists navigate the asymmetries embedded in global forecasting infrastructures. Combining participant observation, archival research, and a multimodal artistic collaboration, Dust Worlds builds on recent critical engagements with atmospheric materiality and dust’s relational politics to examine how contested sovereignties, environmental inequalities, and the politics of breath are rendered visible in an era of climate fragility.