Visualizing Toxic Subjects

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. 

• Centered in the image is Camila, a woman in her early 40s, describing how lead contaminated soils move through space and enter the bodies of denizens of her barrio at the Port of El Callao, Peru.
• Soil around the storage yards contains lead particulate, leaking from passing trucks, transport and storage practices, and mineral robbery by local black market mafias. Camila's neighborhood, only a couple blocks away from the storage yard facing us in the image, is not "counted" among the lead afflicted and doesn't garner the benefits occasionally doled out by transnational corporations at the port.
• The image captured depicts her pointing to the trucks passing by carrying loads of minerals and construction supplies destined for the mineral storage yard across the street. They are supposedly sealed, she comments, but as they pass by, they lift up all the mineral. Her neighbors walk along this road to get to and from work, the kids, to and from school. As she talks, dust lades the air surrounding the truck tires as they screech, turn, break. Worse still, she offers, the wind blows the dust straight to their barrio.
• Without access to other visual technologies, her narrative reflects her embodied visualization of how lead moves through space and bodies. Her pointing and telling imposes a virtual reality upon the viewer to encounter a physical space that entails ambigous flows of toxic matter, which they cannot avoid, even if they cannot fully know.

Caption: Brother and Sister Escape Rain Storm. 

This image is of Pancha and Chon Alanis, brother and sister, taken during my preliminary feildwork in Coamiles, Nayarit, Mexico. I chose this image particularly because it does something that I have difficulty capturing textually, it vividly captures weather as well as bodily/sensorial experience. It also gives the observer an opportunity to visualize the field as an affective plane, where affect is being transmitted through environment, bodies present, and bodies viewing. 

As my project attempts to articulate the everyday experiences, memories, affects, and embodiments that eventually become the foundations for which farmers are able to describe, pinpoint, and make real climate change, I fixate on images like these which capture moments which eventually become memories of "climate change." These visualizations are thus intended to be images of retrospect, in which climate change becomes articulated as the changes within one's lifetime.