ADS11: Toxic Tales: The Extraterritoriality of Toxicity

GRANDEZA STUDIO & LOCUMENT, “STRATA INCOGNITA” commission for the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Spanish Pavilion FOODSCAPES, 2023

Forensic Architecture, 'Cloud Studies' (2021)

There are an estimated 350,000 different types of artificial chemicals currently available on the global market. Of these, an estimated 12,000, which can be found in consumer and professional products, have properties that can cause serious health or environmental concern. On average, three quarters of all chemicals produced in Europe are hazardous. The European Union regulates chemicals one by one; a lengthy process that fails to keep up with an industrial development which produces a new chemical every 1.4 seconds. In the last 13 years, the EU has banned approximately 2,000 hazardous chemicals, more than any other region in the world.

On 14 October 2020, The European Council endorsed a chemical strategy that aims to achieve a ‘toxic-free environment with a higher level of protection of human health and the environment. (...)” The strategy specifically sets out to ban the most harmful chemicals in consumer products such as cosmetics, toys, detergents, childcare items, furniture, textiles or materials that come in contact with food, unless they are deemed essential for health, safety or the functioning of society, or if no alternative is available’. [European Council. "Council Approves Conclusions on the EU Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability." March 15, 2021.] Industrial and political interests are merchants of doubt who generate narratives and modes of representing toxicity that makes invisible and discredits the impact of by-product environmental costs of their activities. While the exploitation of resources is a private endeavour benefiting the corporations responsible for the exploitation, contaminating effects, officially designated by the uncompromising term ‘externalities’, are public. The contamination of soil, water, and atmosphere affects the surrounding environment, population, and, ultimately, the entire planet. It is crucial to emphasise that, while these ‘externalities’ impact the environment, architecture, human and other–than–human populations, they have little to no agency, or control, over the pollution they are subjected to. At the same time, information is often highly manipulated to conceal the hazardous effects of pollution, focusing attention on the apparent benefits.

‘Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or climate change—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory’. [Rob Nixon, 'Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor']

Emilija Škarnulytė, 'Burial' (2022)

We have become accustomed to being surrounded by toxicity. It is in the air that surrounds us, in the water we drink and bathe in, in the products we use inside and outside our homes.
 Chemical persistence in the environment ensures that the impacts of toxicity remain long after the contamination process has ended, making toxicity a prominent part of our lives. These externalities have become internalities, as chemicals are no longer mere background radiation, but rather integral to our material selves, inextricably linked to economic, political, cultural, and scientific networks, and to contemporary crises. With this resignation of control comes an urgent need for reinterpretation. What becomes of our bodies, spaces, and territories after severe contamination?

The Seine in Paris is one of the most contaminated rivers in Europe and was recently brought to global attention by the unsuccessful decontamination attempt for the 2024 Olympic Games. Suffering from sewage contamination, as well as surface runoff from rain and stormwater from the city, its pollution is so severe that despite the efforts made, contamination levels did not drop below acceptable values. As Salomé Roynel, coordinator of the Pesticide Action Network stated, ‘This is without doubt the most significant and widespread contamination of European surface and groundwater by a man-made chemical’ [Stéphane Mandard. “The Seine and Other European Rivers Contaminated by a ‘forever Chemical’ That Has Gone Under the Radar.” Le Monde, 27 May 2024]. On the other side of the world, the colonised territory of French Polynesia was used for the Olympic surfing competition. Its seemingly pristine landscape concealing the aftermath of the French army’s 193 nuclear tests between 1966–96. In 2021, Emmanuel Macron noted, ‘We did it here because we said to ourselves: "It’s lost in the middle of the Pacific, it won’t have the same consequences”’ [Hannah Beech & Adam Ferguson. “Olympic Surfing Comes to a ‘Poisoned’ Paradise.” The New York Times, 30 July 2024].

The Baltic Sea is estimated to hold 1.6 million tonnes of toxic munitions dumped at the end of the Second World War. Of these, there are 40,000 tonnes of accounted chemical munitions that are estimated to contain 15,000 tonnes of chemical warfare agents, all of which are slowly leaking into the sea. The current conflict in Ukraine has left the country’s biodiversity, which totals 35% of Europe’s biodiversity, under severe threat, leading to the endangerment of around 600 animal species and 750 plant and fungi species. Furthermore, this act of ecocide has contaminated Ukrainian territory with landmines, toxic chemicals, and heavy metals, while decimating hundreds of thousands of square miles through contaminated groundwater and burnt natural reserves.

In Canada, the 102 years of activity of the Sydney Steel Corporation have generated the Sydney Tar Ponds: 33 hectares of water and land contaminated with over 700,000 tons of the steel plant’s waste that contributes to the local cancer rate being 45% higher than the regional average. Research revealed that steel workers in Sydney were inhaling the equivalent of smoking 30 plus packs of cigarettes a day. Along the Mississippi River in the USA, over 200 petrochemical manufacturing plants and refineries are responsible for the emission of high amounts of pollutants. In an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that connects New Orleans and Baton Rouge, there is a 95% higher chance of developing cancer than the American average, resulting in the naming of this area as ‘Cancer Alley’.

‘How many partners do you include in the production of your land? How thick do you calculate it has to be? 20 centimetres? 3 meters? 3 kilometres? What about the way water circulates through it all the way down to the deep rock beneath? Have you thought about its porosity and granularity? Are you sure you did not forget earthworms? When you say it’s “yours,” do you include the red sand blowing from the Sahara or the acid rain from Chinese factories?’ Bruno Latour with Christophe Leclercq, 2016.

If a dissolvement period is not monitored, how can this violence be categorised and acted upon? A passing examination of the contamination period, which undervalues both the short- and long-term effects of contaminant chemicals, leads to a lack of responsibility on the part of the perpetrators and an abandonment of affected populations. How might this ecological and human violence be revealed and monitored? And what possible architectural responses might be generated?

Formafantasma, 'Cambio, 23:21' (2020)

'In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world?' [Rob Nixon, 'Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor'.]

Starting in 2024/25, ADS11 will begin a long-term project that is focused on researching and cataloguing anthropogenic toxic pollution. While maintaining each project's individuality, the studio aims to generate a body of knowledge that is part of a larger conceptual framework. This knowledge base created is intended to be communicated to a wider audience, building awareness of the toxic territories that surround us, while also speculating on the landscapes they can generate in the future.

Using the periodic table of elements as a starting point, the studio will research both individual chemicals and chemical compounds that have hazardous effects on the world we inhabit. Focusing on the chemicals instead of specific locations allows for each project to focus on the transcalarity of contamination, allowing projects to address issues present across multiple sites.

What design tools are available to conceptualise, approach, and shape the built environment through the prism of toxicity? What is the agency of design in shaping the environment for its containment? What are the social, political, and ecological imperatives of toxicity, how are they hidden by contemporary practices, and how can design make them public? Can alternative aesthetics and practices make toxicity a constructive component of geographic imagination?

Wang & Söderström, 'Rehousing Technosphere' (2020)

ADS11 works with filmmaking and the visual arts as a framework for building and creating nonfiction and fictional narratives. By connecting those two methodologies and tools, it allows for the questioning and dismantling of official narratives, evident in our documentary/research films, as well as the construction of new, alternative narratives through our later film projects.

Each project is a document, a report, and a chronicle as well as a proposal, a speculative scenario, and an imaginary future. The studio embraces narrative as an essential part of architectural design and affords importance to the creation of self-explanatory thought processes, which guide the spectator through the project and its argumentative reasoning. Through the use of narrative, ADS11 pays attention to the resulting effects, speculating on what landscapes and new modes of existence might emerge from these toxic formations.

The studio's main aims are: (1) to develop a methodology for accountability by confronting the irreversible consequences of toxicants, including their decomposition and persistence in the environment, and to imagine strategies for coexisting with and managing these toxic landscapes; and (2) to create practical design tools, devices, and strategies that address contamination, minimising harm and fostering resilience. By translating research into actionable knowledge, the studio seeks to anticipate, mitigate, and design around the hazards of pollution, while proposing frameworks for repair and long-term management of its effects.

'Field work is a vital process of enquiry in creative art practices materialising and forming the imagination through the presence of being in place. Fieldwork positions artists into a multidimensional and active encounter with place. This meeting unfolds through a series of “operations”, or sets of relations, which involve constant negotiation with place: materially, socially and symbolically. One way to understand these relations of negotiation is to identify the artist as a mediator, translating their experience of place and re-presenting it through artistic outcomes or products of enquiry'. [Kristen Sharp, Open Fields: Fieldwork as a Creative Process.]

As Tim Ingold has argued, ‘place is not a preexisting thing waiting to be revealed by artists and anthropologists, Rather, place is formed through the imagination’. As a language and methodology, film requires field work. Digital research is confronted and complemented with physical presence. These are opposite ends of the research process. While digital research allows for access to a vast amount of information from a great distance, physical presence allows a limited amount of information from close–proximity and detail. Such a combination is vital to compose a multi-layered perspective on research topics, as well as developing a personal relationship with the particularities of each location, its nuances, and problematics.

Gerard Ortín Castellví, 'Bliss Point' (2024)

'It is a form of tacit understanding, where the artist is not manipulating the environment to record (whether sound or images) and imposing the imagination onto these materials, but rather the imagination is materialised through embodied practices of being in the field'. [Kristen Sharp, Open Fields: Fieldwork as a Creative Process.]

As a studio, ADS11 will follow the research methodology of LOCUMENT. We combine research with documentary and design proposals, engaging with communities, organisations, institutions and private entities. Film will be used both as a research device, as well as a medium to communicate each proposal and its line of argumentation. As a process, this demands an open dialogue with a wide spectrum of expertise and agents in order to produce work that is relevant, respectful, and sensitive to the societies we engage with. In this process, the studio forms collaborations with a multitude of entities, institutions, NGOS and other organisations as we conduct a series of site visits, seminars, lectures and interviews.

Studio participants will be encouraged to understand these processes as a multi-layered methodology of design, anthropological principles, and film technology that can be put into practice. We will immerse ourselves into communities and environments that define these locations in order to present them throughout the different stages of the projects. These different stages and their translation into knowledge, tools, and steps for action will allow us to predict their dangers or/and reverse their consequences.

The studio uses film as a methodological approach, using architecture and narrative as analytical, critical, and subversive tools. Film will be used as a medium to express both research and design. Developing narrative as a means of expressing the thought process of the project is a method that is both comprehensive and accessible for the audience of the project. The goal of the studio is to develop each project's language for reflecting its content, moulding the studio’s design process through the ambition of allowing each case study to provide unique mode of representing toxicity.

In 2024/25, the ADS11 Live Project will involve a collaboration with Ci.CLO and the Bienal Fotografia do Porto in the creation of a collective project that will be exhibited at the Bienal’25 'TOMORROW TODAY' in May 2025. The Live Project will address and reflect upon the curatorial statement: ‘TOMORROW TODAY, intended to provoke discussion and action to create what we want to see in the future NOW. The future is built on the present. TOMORROW TODAY envisions a stringent, healthier, regenerative world. As the Bienal team we ask ourselves - what is our purpose, how do we achieve our objectives and why are we undertaking this process? The Bienal’25 model is a platform of case studies in which artists, curators, cultural, social and government organisations partner and collaborate, offering strategies and outcomes that can be emulated, replicated and shared.’

While developing a collective project, the live project of ADS11 will focus on exploring different processes of conceptualising and producing filmic narratives. We will explore distinct phases of the filming process – concept creation, production, directing, cinematography, post-production, editing, and sound design – both on location, as well as in studio. Workshops and tutorials will be conducted for each phase of the filmmaking process where a series of mixed media – combining real footage with animation, performative acts, photography and computer generated imagery – visual essays will be developed.

Ci.CLO is a platform for artistic research, production and intervention in the medium of photography that establishes a transdisciplinary relationship with other artistic, environmental and social fields to critically address the emergencies of our time. The projects seek to contribute to socio-ecological regeneration through the visual arts.

References:

Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity Press, 2018)

Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Critical Zones. The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth (MIT Press, 2020)

Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (Polity Press, 2018)

Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Zone Books, 2017)

Holly Jean Buck, After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (Verso, 2019)

Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights (Princeton University Press, 2006)

Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press, 2014)

Francisco Lobo and Romea Muryń are the founders of LOCUMENT – a research studio that combines filmmaking with architecture research. They use architecture and film as analytical, critical and subversive tools to emphasise contemporary issues and dissect their resolutions. They see the importance of observing rapidly changing social conditions through the influential factors of technology, economy, politics and urban environment. Drawing from contemporary scenarios, LOCUMENT travels to unique locations to base their research topics, finding in them situations that, while site-specific, reflect problematics that resonate throughout the globe. Bringing out these underlying stories, their work focuses on recreating the complex storyline hidden under the surface of the visible spectrum.

LOCUMENT movies have been screened internationally at exhibitions and film festivals such as – the 15th and 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (Venice, Italy); the 25th Biennial of Design Ljubljana (Slovenia); Arquiteturas Film Festival Lisbon (Portugal); Tbilisi Architecture Biennial & In-Between Conditions Media Art Festival (Georgia); Commiserate Chicago Media Art Festival (US), MAXXI The National Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome (Italy), the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (Portugal), Tabakalera - International Centre for Contemporary Culture (Spain), International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and Rotterdam Architecture Film Festival (Netherlands). They have collaborated with academic institutions such as MIT Architecture Department (Cambridge, US), Amsterdam University of Arts, Academy of Architecture (Netherlands), The Bartlett School of Architecture (Netherlands), Bartlett Prospective - UCL The Bartlett School of Architecture (United Kingdom), INDA - Chulalongkorn University Faculty of Architecture (Thailand) and FAVUT Faculty of Architecture in Brno (Czech Republic). www.thelocument.com

Christopher Sejer Fischlein is a London-based filmmaker. His research-driven practice explores the social and environmental conditioning of the human body in the contemporary world. In 2022 he released the documentary, Light Without Sun, co-written and directed with Clara Kraft Isono and Marie Ramsing. The film reflects on the sensory nature of architecture and uses interviews, narrative, and choreography to challenge how buildings are documented. In 2023, he initiated 'Toxophore', a project using moving image to explore the interactions between persistent industrial chemicals and human bodies within water systems, highlighting how these agents reshape both material realities and bodily boundaries. Additionally, he is a lecturer in design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

His work has been showcased at the Arquiteturas Film Festival (Lisbon, PT), Bergen International Film Festival (Norway), BARQ Festival (Barcelona, ES), ByDesign Film Festival (Seattle, US) and Copenhagen Architecture Festival (Denmark).