“This fantastic is not the one that interrupts the ordinary course of things but rather that which is at once strange and present, at the same time its contradiction and its confirmation.” - Clement Rosset
The philosopher Michael Marder describes dust as an element that transgresses the boundaries between temporal modalities, residing in non-sequential time that collapses the “babel” of past, present, and future. “Eternity is time configured as space, or space indistinguishable from time, and dust is its swirling, disintegrating, and conglomerating image.” In Talk with Dust, Diaz Morales returns to the harsh, arid Patagonian landscape that has significantly shaped his artistic language. Spreading across six-channels Talk with Dust opens with a vertical projection of road shot from a moving vehicle. With the camera focused entirely on the asphalt this view of Patagonia’s route 26 dissolves into something that resembles a Structuralist film more than a scenic drive— thereby setting the tone for a journey without a clear destination. Over the video’s six channels, which unfold over screens of different sizes and orientation, we encounter a slow-burning candle, a drummer improvising, an explosion, and a car cycling endlessly in the desert. Through the viewers’ own movement through space, these isolated occurrences form their own asynchronic narrative and generate a fragmented world—rich mental and material territories on “the other side of the real” where the fantastic resides.