This visualization creates a temporary toxicity inventory in Pasadena, California. Based on a series of documents, the author illustrates how the discursive practices that make toxicity or the slogan invisible in the distant past can be visually intervened. This intervention illuminates what was erased or circumscribed to the past, transforming it into a colorful visual representation of the (lineal) temporalities of toxicity.
Measuring, mapping and monitoring toxic places is a highly technical practice.
Knowledge production of toxicity seems to be hidden, buried on piles and piles of papers.
Inquiring on toxicity requires digging out, not only samples of possibly-polluted soils but also of reports and maps.
The visualization emphasizes the porosity of barriers we take for granted. Toxicity flows from factories to water, water to fish, and fish to humans, cycling through visibility and invisibility along the way. Contamination is alterately acknowledged, blamed, ignored, or denied depending on situational risks to markets and incomes.
This visualization emphasizes the slippage between the body and the landscape as toxicity can flow between the two. It underscores the porosity of barriers we take for granted. Contaminants flow from industry to water, from water to fish, from fish to humans, through cycles of visibility and invisibility. Contamination is alternately acknowledged, denied, or ignored depending on the risks posed to livelihoods and markets.
That toxic places are bodily experienced and that by removing the body from those places we become disjointed ourselves and don’t understand it. This removal can be part of a protection mechanism.
The visualization tells us the fourth-part of a story about a toxic place, which aims to change its historical past marked by war-era toxicity through a renewed narrative detached from its toxic past. However, other narratives emerging from local activists put into consideration the untold history in the new development planning. Therefore, the visualization shows us a constructed reality of toxicity, with different representations and imaginaries through time.
The artifact illustrates the existence of multiple toxcities, that are growing in forests due to various factors like deforestation. It presents the narratives of war and peace that are affecting pluriverses of forests. Here, the artifact presents a case of forest as a victim.
This visualization highlights the way in which history can be told in a way that embellishes the use of toxics and the creation of toxic environments, by pretending that there are solutions to stop toxicity and start all over again, or simply creating a narrative that renders invisible any trace of a toxic past
When toxics are felt they are more “real.” When they are felt they are lived. If people feel it, how can the government or corporations ignore it? Don’t politicians and CEOs have senses to feel toxics? I like that the image also brings us back to a well known argument of who are the people who are in closest contact to toxicity, and how their lives are exposed to chemicals in very different ways than those who produce that toxicity in the first place.
The artifact highlights rooted understanding contamination and decontamination in the region. Moreover, the it suggests the differences in the understanding of toxicities among the locals and the governmet agencies.