What does this visualization (including caption) say about toxics?

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Duygu Kasdogan's picture
March 2, 2020

This visualization shows us how a river becomes a toxic place as it ran dry but home only to wastewater.

Elena Sobrino's picture
March 2, 2020

This visualization is ethnographically rich because you take a work of art that seems to be more or less a piece of political quasi-propaganda for the president's economic and agricultural goals for the country, but your framing helps us see it as a visualization not simply of progress or aspiration but a much more complicated relationship between toxics and social reproduction.

Duygu Kasdogan's picture
March 2, 2020
In response to:

This visualization does not directly talk about "toxics" but about "risk", namely flood risk due to climate change. We also learn that environmental activists use similar images to mobilize residents around the knowledge about the risk they face.

Miriam Waltz's picture
March 2, 2020

This visualisation speaks about the ways in which toxics can be present yet invisble, the uncertainties around them and the local understandings and fears related to this not-knowing, or knowing after the fact, and the material traces and infrastructures of industrial projects through which toxics continue to spread and may be made visible.

March 1, 2020

I think it materializes toxicity in the archive well, as the author intends. Toxicity is made through knowledge and that knowledge must exist in the world in certain forms in order to do the political/scientific/governing work intended of it. Someone must care for, interpret, and archive this toxic knowledge or it will cease to exist. I would love to see the author unpack this idea of toxic archiving more through this image. 

Kaitlyn Rabach's picture
March 1, 2020

For the contributor, I think the toxicity is in the lack of infrastructure around this type of very important archiving. For me, I actually see some of the toxicity in the wild goose chase that seems to be these documents. The toxicity could also be in the disjointedness of the documents and findings themselves. Also, would be interested in getting Wilma’s story? Is there a form of gender toxicity here too? How did she become a one woman show? That history also seems toxic.

 

Monique Azzara's picture
March 1, 2020
In response to:

The image and captions convey the literal toxicity of PM2.5 and its effects on the body. The use of an image with a colonial era monument in the backdrop further complicates the image's representation of toxicity. 

Andrea Bravo's picture
March 1, 2020
In response to:

This composition is very rich in data, the idea of a "clean" toxicity is there, perhaps you could further develop a conceptualization of toxicity that is "hidden", is toxic for some, or maybe a discussion of gentrification as displaced toxicity.  

Andrea Bravo's picture
March 1, 2020

It says that petrochemical-related toxicity is part of a global business. 

March 1, 2020
In response to:
The images in this essay contribute to a sense that toxicity prompts, and is caught up in, political and social discourses. The commentary tells the viewer that we might only understand ambiguous, atmospheric toxcities through the lenses provided by science, media, and political statements. Toxics are therefore not seen as particles, but through words, images, attempts to provoke action. They are therefore affective existents in themselves.

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