In 2013, I worked with ethnographic collaborators to visually represent the problematic of lead contamination at the Port of El Callao, Perú. Usually unnoticed in the fray of mining politics, the port presents an unusual but critical site to contemplate the human impacts of extraction through its pervasive condition of toxic exposure. The port is where particulate minerals, mined in the Andes, are transported and stored before being shipped to foreign markets. Leaking trucks, porous storage yards, dusty roads, mineral theft, and corporate-state corruption all contribute to why lead contamination persists in the shantytowns of the port, despite fifteen years of technocratic intervention. The privileging of technical expertise has slowly corroded the political participation of exposed residents, whose knowledge of the situation is often derided by state officials as "too political." At the end of my fieldwork, I conspired with friends of the so-called lead zone to invert this logic by creating a film premised on the assertion that residents offer the technical expertise of direct experience. The approach is thus intentionally not multi-perspectival. The resulting film, currently rough-cut together but slated for minor editing and a new conclusion, attempts to depict the un-depictable: the movement of an invisible substance through an urban space and the human bodies that inhabit it, subject to complex material, political, and symbolic forces. It is entirely narrated and guided by denizens of the lead zone and how they visualize lead within their semiotic-material world.
At the Port of El Callao, residents know from previous scientific studies that their urban ecology contains lead from the storage and transport of mineral particulate and so do their bodies. They are also acutely aware that little has been done by the state or mineral brokers to remedy their situation. In daily life, they are left to observe, hypothesize, and imagine the pathways through which lead enters into their neighborhoods, homes, and bodies. This set of images previews a scene of the "Lead Zone" in which a resident maps the movement of lead particulates outside the storage yards–– from soils, tires, air, to lungs.
Design Statement:
I selected this screen shot from the film documentary "The Lead Zone" (Graeter 2018) because it captures a moment of toxic virtuality storytelling.
At the Port of El Callao, residents know from previous scientific studies that their urban ecology contains lead from the storage and transport of mineral particulate and so do their bodies. They are also acutely aware that little has been done by the state or mineral brokers to remedy their situation. In daily life, they are left to observe, hypothesize, and imagine the pathways through which lead enters into their neighborhoods, homes, and bodies. This set of images previews a scene of the "Lead Zone" in which a resident maps the movement of lead particulates outside the storage yards–– from soils, tires, air, to lungs.
Design Statement:
Stefanie Graeter. 28 November 2018, "The Lead Zone (La Zona del Plomo)", Center for Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 28 November 2018, accessed 19 April 2024. http://centerforethnography.org/content/lead-zone-la-zona-del-plomo
I chose this screen shot from the documentary film "The Lead Zone" because it poignantly captures the inevitability of leaded dust inhalation at the Port of El Callao.