«Al unirse lo alto y lo bajo, el hombre en un prodigio del secreto se convirtió».
— Farid ud-Din Attar, El lenguaje de los pájaros.

Polvo y plumas (Dust & feathers) is a reflection on matter and perception, fragility and transformation. The birds, initially treated as subjects to be portrayed, become a vehicle through which questions of existence, dignity, conflict, death and transcendence can emerge.

We live between the impulse to preserve and the certainty of disappearance. These conditions appear to be opposed, yet that certainty might be what sets the impulse in motion. Everything returns to dust. Human action, and therefore art, attempts to resist that process by leaving traces, constructing memory and transmitting knowledge. Paper embodies this condition with particular precision. Thin, fragile and vulnerable, it can carry memory, remain a surface or become a volume. Its apparent weakness reveals its potential.

The bird enters this space as a figure that escapes gravity and moves between states. The progression from small birds to confrontation, vultures feeding and collective flight describes a movement from withdrawal to conflict, from destruction towards transformation. Dust and feathers are the elementary signs of this language: what remains as matter gives way, and what allows it to rise.

“When the high and the low were mated together,
A mortal man became the most wondrous of mysteries.”

— Farid ud-Din Attar, Mantiq al-Tayr (The Speech of the Birds). Translated from the Persian by Peter Avery (1998).