ChertLüdde is pleased to present Sandra Poulson’s first exhibition in Germany: Dust as an accidental gift. Originally commissioned for the Sharjah Architecture Triennial in 2023, the installation reflects on the pervasive presence of dust in her hometown, Luanda. In recreating one of the most vital commercial hubs in Angola’s capital, dust becomes a lens to explore the city’s social, economic, political, cultural, and urban rhythms.

In her practice, Sandra Poulson (Angolan, b. 1995, Lisbon, Portugal) employs an autoethnographic approach to investigate Angola’s symbols, codes, and cultural objects. In doing so, she often traces histories and oral traditions, rethinking their relation to global political structures.

In Dust as an accidental gift, Poulson reflects on the rituals and peripheral infrastructures that sustain daily life in Luanda. Her methodology is grounded in the social networks of “Near South”1 geographies, as articulated by urban theorist AbdouMaliq Simone. Building on Simone’s observations that the South is not a fixed world region but an urban condition—and his notion of “accidental gifts”2 as unforeseen catalysts of city life—Poulson stages Luanda’s encounter with dust as a force that, though indirect, shapes the dance of urban existence. Drawing on observations from growing up in Luanda, she presents the Kikolo Market as a case study, where dust consistently directs the gaze downward and toward the improvised, shared movements that animate economic trade and everyday services.

The exhibition opens with a video of the entrance to the Kikolo Market. As the aerial view pans outward, showing cars, trucks, pedestrians, and goods moving below, dust rises with each motion until it gradually settles into a quasi-opaque layer that blankets the space. The movement is both synchronized and casual—a city in constant equilibrium, flowing according to its own self-conceived choreography.

Further inside the gallery, market items form an irregular pathway that echoes the structure of the Kikolo Market. Dried fish is placed near chairs and crates; clothes hang from a cement wall; boots line the edges. Visitors must negotiate every step by looking down at these objects, each carefully selected by the artist for the memories and associations they carry. Mirroring the improvised pathways of the market, the installation emphasizes how such spaces within the Near South are navigated, shared, and collectively produced. As interventions within the urban fabric, these goods are placed wherever space allows, representing a form of exchange that is not only economic but also requires communal negotiation.

From spiraling anti-mosquito incense to packets of Tang juice concentrate, each element is unified by a common surface, as if sealed beneath a heavy layer of dust. Now relocated within the gallery and made from cardboard and starch, these objects not only speak to use or exchange, but their uniformity shifts attention towards space-making. They endure as archaeological fragments, bearing witness to urban life and the networks of interaction that sustain it. Objects once defined by function are now withheld from use: preserved rather than consumed, they invite reflection on a different kind of value—one that emerges precisely from their displacement.

This transformation begins with two materials ubiquitous in Luanda. Cardboard, circulating through the city in a top-down flow, becomes part of the Kikolo market’s soft infrastructure, serving as tables, chairs, and mats. When combined with water and starch made from corn, a staple of Angolan cooking, it behaves like mud, recalling the material reality of the region. Drawing on Luanda’s tangible materials, Poulson highlights the endurance of the market’s ephemera, infusing it with the same fragility as the choreography of dust.

Within this presentation, dust alludes to Angola’s colonial past (1484-1975), when white Portuguese settlers occupied the waterfront while Black native Angolans were pushed inland. When accessing infrastructure in the city (for work, church, public institutions), Angolans were forced toward semiotic assimilation into Portuguese society by ridding their bodies and surroundings of any dust through rituals like shoe polishing, dust sweeping, and eventually car tire washing in order to avoid being traced to unpaved land. These symbolic borders endure today between the paved streets of the Cidade de Cimento (cement city) and the neighborhoods paved by the dust.

In Luanda, dust becomes a boundary-maker, a mechanism of socio-economic surveillance, and a means of structuring urban life—its removal sustaining countless livelihoods. More than a byproduct of land and city, dust sets the rhythm of Luanda through its repetitive, ritual demands. Reflecting on this, Poulson notes, “When considering human life, it is key to pay attention to the human capacity to make, and Luandans are making life from dust.” The exhibition demonstrates how people transform what is undesirable into provisional, self-led methodologies; dust becomes, in this sense, an “accidental gift.” But beyond just the dispossession experienced in Luanda, dust was what originally connected land, matter, and place with the indigenous people. Preceding any human intervention or colonial interference, it reasserts balance, ownership and indigeneity, ultimately challenging the colonial projects’ intent of separating people and land.

(The exhibition is a collaboration between ChertLüdde, Berlin and Jahmek Contemporary Art, Luanda)

Notes

1 AbdouMaliq Simone, Jakarta, drawing the city near, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2014.
2 AbdouMaliq Simone, University of South Australia. Urban dwellers and the changing city – knowledge works, 2013 (Online lecture).