Toxicity’s Reach considers the intimate ways in which micro-polluting chemicals are entangled with beings, their environments, contexts and situations today. Through commissioning, public events and research, its projects trace how synthetic toxicants intra-act with life and its relations, weaving together different values from pasts towards futures, creating unknown and unexpected life conditions. Tracing these stories, it aims to open up conversations about ethical actions and ways of living in toxic worlds.
That we all inhabit toxic worlds is what Kim Fortun has called a ‘slow disaster’. Many of us are born into toxic contexts and are obscured from the inequitable realities that toxicity often maintains. Built on a network of extractive industries - petrochemical, pharmaceutical, agrobusiness - unspeakably vast amounts of synthetic chemicals, largely unregulated, are created, used and released as waste into our worlds every year. As they move through seas, soils and bodies, toxicants also disrupt forms of life at different scales. Visceral. Intimate. Penetrative. Microplastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers and care products, work their ways into our porous lives and burden our bodies (some more than others). Their exposure follows human power stories, harming in material and other-than-material ways. Often latent in our bodies and worlds for many years, today, micro-polluting chemicals are found in all corners of the earth and in every living body that has been tested, their effects surfacing according to their own time frames.
Toxicity’s reach has resulted in what some have described as a ‘permanently polluted’ Earth. To think that the Earth will remain toxic long after we are gone, reminds us that there is no pristine ideal to return to. Tracing chemicals as they act out relations in multiscalar and multisited ways, between things to other things, we can see how toxicity displaces some forms of life whilst maintaining other structures. As toxicants flow and leak and wend they diverge from age-old sociomaterial fault lines placed upon them, knotting us in connections acted out across divisions between bodies and environments. Changes in subjectivity, disruption, disturbance, colonisation are processes of ‘unworlding’ that unmake “normal” world orders. As Toxicity unworlds, how might ‘chemical knowing’ open up conversations about toxicity beyond conservation?
The following website is dedicated to thinking about toxicity’s reach in the Mersey estuary, Liverpool. Three newly commissioned online artworks by artists, Mary Maggic, Luiza Prado de O. Martins and Sissel Marie Tonn, experiment with tracing the multiscalar and multisited entanglements between life and either microplastics, endocrine-disruptors or petrochemicals in this historic, industrial body of water. The exhibition is accompanied by an essay and a digital repository, recovering and weaving various disparate histories of how contaminants of emerging concern ‘came into being’ in the Mersey and beyond. Living in what Alexis Shotwell has called ‘interdependent worlds’, prompts us to reconsider how we should live ethically today. The exhibition asks how exposure to chemical water pollutants affects us culturally, socially and ideologically? What particular actions are needed and what modes of ethical living can we adopt to flourish in toxic worlds.
An accessible version of the works can be found here.
The participating artists are Mary Maggic, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, and Sissel Marie Tonn.
Website design by Rifke Sadleir.
The essay has been written by Dani Admiss. Proofread by John Merrick.
Digital Production by Tadeo Lopez-Sendon.
Curated by Dani Admiss.
Commissioned and produced by
Supported using public funding by
With Special Thanks to
the artists, Rifke Sadleir, John Merrick, Ruth McCullough, Catherine Waddington, Tadeo Lopez-Sendon, the Abandon Normal Devices team, Tim Murray-Browne and Alex Futtersa. Deepest thanks to those who have helped in the development and realisation of this project so far, Steve Cartwright, Alexandra Levene, Nora O’Murchu, Ellen Greig, Jonathan May, Alexis Shotwell, Magarida Mendes, Onkar Kular, Gillian Russell, Beatrice Leanza, Mariana Pestana, David Falkner and Rebecca Moss.