Alfredo Ramos Fernández’s Stein und Staub series delves into life’s inherent exposure — made hauntingly evident during the Covid-19 pandemic — and the individual and collective performances of control that emerge in response. Building on the photographer’s longstanding inquiry into the mechanisms by which past events reverberate into the present, the series documents how people in his hometown of Havana, Cuba coped with the viral threat, as well as the cracks it made visible in the city’s social and political infrastructure. The photographs capture material traces of how this moment was lived and felt, the fears it activated, capturing an internal state that was collectively, even if differentially, experienced. Moving beyond the archival, the artist’s use of decades-old film inhabited by mold, in a format smaller than 35mm, results in textured images that, in their increasing abstraction, reveal the ever-present filter through which any given moment in time and place is perceived.