Arlit [Niger] is no longer a site but a slow-moving corpse, carrying within its crust the tremors of colonial appetite, where extraction was not an event but a method of inscription. The non-neutral accumulation of dust – a veil, a residue, a witness – signals more than decay. It is the choreography of latency, of something still breathing beneath the scorched topsoil. The bacterial digestion of toxicity resists the contamination, refusing to stabilize the wound. Instead it performs digestion as a counter-memory, a metabolic refusal of erasure. These agents, microbial, particulate, peel back the desert’s opacity, exposing the violence coded into the terrain’s so-called empty.
