Becoming Dust & Stars by Araceli Gomez Castro

Curated by Mattie O’Callaghan

Becoming Dust & Stars explores our relationships with rituals and stories emerging out of the soil. Collaborating with Indigenous knowledges and practices, White Magic and elements gifted by the earth, we invite you to discover the sensuality of materials in our everyday lives. Building on interconnected collectives of care, we become closer to the ecologies which hold us, realising we are all becoming dust & stars. We offer a space for you to take part in your own ritual to allow yourself to be transformed and become part of our interconnected whole. 

To make work is to collaborate, to bring care into every step of the process. In each piece, from the sourcing of materials from Zapotec cooperatives to hand-making pigments, and gathering the soil, each is seen as a gift to honour and reciprocate. Through the sociogram, each supporter and collaborator of the project is recognised.

In revealing the process through a materials chart and photographs, we can trace the origin of each item, to open space for learning about how they become artworks through multiple collaborations and layers of support. Sourced from botanicals, metals, minerals, rocks, imaginaries, and digital and recycled materials, we invite you to come closer to these stories and trace the interconnected elements of which we are all made of.

Working in a multidisciplinary way across painting, sculpture, performance, and workshops, Becoming Dust & Stars opens up multiple avenues for our earthly connections. For in the bustling streets of high-rise London we can find time for acts of care, attention and solidarity, becoming the hidden earth and sky beneath and above us.