Artist, Nina Katchadourian: When I tell people I’ve been working on a project about dust, you’d be amazed how often they bring up the song “Dust in the Wind,” a soft rock hit by the band Kansas from 1978.
I’ll offer you a personal memory about this song. I was kid, on vacation with my family, and in the restaurant where we were having dinner, “Dust in the Wind” was playing, on repeat.
At some point it hit me that what the song was really saying was that my parents were going to die one day. I grew hot with anxiety, and I couldn’t eat the rest of my dinner. I got it: dust meant the end.
But dust is also a kind of beginning, and people also bring up the song Woodstock written by Joni Mitchell in 1970, because the chorus has the line “We are stardust.”
For a long time I took that as metaphor, meaning something like “We are all part of this giant universe.” But the lyric is actually, “We are stardust, billion-year-old carbon,” and that’s based on a scientific fact: there are atoms in our bodies that are billions of years old, because when stars die they emit gases, part of which cool and condense into smoke-like particles of stardust. They helped form our planet - and us. Stars continue to expire—in fact, 40,000 tons of stardust falls to Earth each year. We are stardusty.