Occupational Realism II (Mold Horror)

Mold seems to be having a moment in the register of horror at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Dust had its time as an emerging object of epidemiological concern at the end of the nineteenth century. Dust and mold may not be that different from an epidemiological perspective but the distinction this vignette entertains is primarily aesthetic. Dust and mold carry different association. Dust is archival, at once a deposit and a concentrate of reality—of the kind of reality, that is, history is supposed to be made of. Moldy continuity doesn’t avail itself to historical time.