Dust Doesn’t Think of Us interrogates Western bio-ontologies that privilege living, thinking beings over inert, non-living matter. Drawing inspiration from a local cemetery encountered during fieldwork in the Gobi Desert, the film blends footage by Flora Weil and filmmaker Maria Fernandez Pello to explore human relationships with nonlife — through geomantic practices, mineral collections, burial sites, and archaeological remains. The film engages in a speculative conversation with desert dust to challenge the supremacy of “thinking life,” suggesting that categories such as life and nonlife are culturally constructed and mutable. Commissioned for the Design in Rising Winds Atlas by Flora Weil, M+ Museum, and Design Trust, the film unfolds as a poetic meditation on the porous boundaries between thought, being, and materiality.