ADS11: Forever Chemicals: Political Ecologies of Toxicity

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

PFAs, also known as Forever Chemicals, are human-made chemicals that are considered nearly indestructible. They have been detected in the most remote regions of the globe, from the Arctic to Antarctica. Despite being created by humans, these chemicals do not understand the concept of human–defined boundaries, borders, or other geographic, sociological, or political delimitations. Instead, they react uniquely to the fluidity of nature. As such, they fail to be contained by corporations, or their policies and borders. PFAs are in our blood, our clothes, our cosmetics. These chemicals have been developed to suit the conveniences of modern living and are present everywhere – in items such as food packaging, household paint, sports and water–repellent clothing, guitar strings, laundry detergent, and our cell phone screens. ‘Persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic,‘ they have a life span from 1 to 1,000,000 years, essentially meaning they are an irreversible presence, becoming a permanent part of the soil and human body.

‘There is a very clear link, then, between economic growth and environmental tumult. And there is a very clear link between economic growth and social tumult, in the sense that we sacrifice more and more of our public infrastructure, our commons, and good conditions of living for everyone, in the pursuit of a few decimals of GDP growth.’—Giorgos Kallis, 2020

As public land becomes capital investment, ownership models, stakeholder structures, and the speculative, blurry mechanisms behind them, all have to be questioned. Economic imperialism fails to understand fluidity is an inherent aspect of nature and the boundaries defined by humans are not respected by the world of chemicals. These boundaries, whether bureaucratic, political or geographic, do not account for the permeability and interchangeability of the natural world. Even when applied, methods of containment are local – while the contamination is global. Accordingly, there is a need to accept the irreversibility of the process and the need to adapt to the presence of Forever Chemicals. This adaptation process, on an empirical standpoint, might not be implemented by the polluter, or the chemical itself, but rather by the environments and populations affected by these chemicals.

‘How many partners do you include in the production of your land? How thick do you calculate it has to be? 20 centimeters? 3 meters? 3 kilometers? 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

In 2023/24, ADS11 will ask a series of questions. If a dissolvement period is not monitored, how can this act of aggression 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?

LOCUMENT & Maya Shopova, co-directed with Aaron Powers, Dijana Milenov, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Kevin Marblestone, Jaya Alba Eyzaguirre, and Prathima Muniyappa, “THE SKY COMMODIFIED” commission by MIT Architecture - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019

The studio aims to investigate the dynamics of non-degradable chemicals in soil, water, human and other–than–human bodies, and the built environment. This investigation will enable an understanding of political ecologies and land regulatory ownership regimes through the lenses of fluid contamination, informing the basis for the design project. We will encounter the perverse unequal triangular relationship between: the polluter, the chemical, the affected (human & other–than–human) and explore the following research perspectives:

(1) The Polluter - focuses on how the extreme extraction of land resources leaves traces of social and ecological violation. Artificial chemicals are developed, created, and produced by direct polluters (humans, institutions, organisations) and should be subject to accountability and responsibility policies.

Currently, there are no accountability processes for corporations, who are not held responsible for releasing and spreading polluting substances on soil, water, and atmosphere. This leads to the recurring need for national intervention to recover damaged or contaminated land. While indirect polluters (government agencies and institutions) withdraw or reformulate legislations that enable these actions to take place.

(2) The Chemical - researches how minute, intangible human-made particles leave tangible traces on the environment, human body, and anything it comes into contact with these chemicals.

These chemicals are actively embedded in our surroundings and the products we use daily – food, food packaging, textiles, clothes, body and beauty care products, cell phones, wall paint, carpet. They can be found throughout our surroundings in soil, groundwater, air, rainwater, and household dust. Molecule manipulation and renaming allow for manufacturers to alter formulas and reinsert products on the market before administrative bodies can gather the necessary evidence to regulate its use.

(3A) The Affected | Human - examines level of contamination by chemicals in order to reveal the tangibility of pollution on the scale of the human body. The exposure of contaminated areas by chemicals causes severe damages which are not straightforwardly detectable. The intentional and unintentional release of toxic components that affect populations in interaction with these chemicals, renders them helpless to their negative effects, very clearly manifesting in degradation of health.

(3B) The Affected | Other–than–Human - addresses fluidity as a characteristic that allows pollution to transverse and permeate human–defined borders, allowing the contamination of both adjacent and distant lands. Allowing pollution in such territories effectively means these chemicals spill over into the surrounding environment, affecting everything in their path. Land ownership and usage should be bound with local, national and continental responsibility. As land usage is perceived as a capitalizable commodity, land sovereignty is often driven by individualised economic interest. The way private corporations use land typically displays a complete disregard for adjacent and nonadjacent environments (soil, water, nature) that might be negatively affected by their actions.

ADS11 studio practice will follow Locument’s methodology of using architecture and film as analytical, critical, and subversive tools to dissect contemporary issues. We will combine research with documentary and design proposals, engaging with communities, organisations, institutions and private entities. As a methodology, this demands an open dialogue with a wide spectrum of expertise and agents in order to produce work that has a relevance, respect, and sensitivity to the societies in which you are immersed.

Studio members will be encouraged to understand these processes as a multi-layered methodology of design, anthropological principles, and film technology to be put into practice. We will immerse ourselves into communities and environments that define these conflicts in order to present them in diverse stages. 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.

Using the ‘Unequal Triangle of Relations’ trajectories, each student/team will be asked to focus on a single theme to unfold research and design trajectories and outline their own hypotheses. The studio will work with filmmaking and animation as a framework for building and creating nonfiction and fictional narratives. By connecting those two methodologies and tools, it will allow students to question and dismantle official narratives (documentary–research movie phase) as much as to build new, alternative ones (animation phase).

The studio's main aim is: (1) to create a method for accountability by considering the irreversible consequences of Forever Chemicals, such as decomposition and degradability period, in order to imagine how we might live with and manage those toxic environments; and (2) to create design tools, devices, and strategies to handle the contamination and reduce harm to those affected. These different stages and their translation into knowledge, tools, and steps for action, will allow us to predict and design their dangers, repair, and management of their consequences.

Field Trip & Live Projct

In the UK, the highest levels of PFAS were found in a discharge from a chemicals plant on the River Wyre, above Blackpool. The ADS11 will travel to the River Wyre and its land usage impact, closely analysing fluidity as a crucial component of soil, water, and the built environment. While the research will be focused on a local / national scale, its resonance is global. Chemical pollution by forever chemicals – in the specific context of the River Wyre river in England – is not to be understood as a symbol of how systemic legislation failure allows for corporations to pollute soil and water and affect local populations. Rather, it is because of this systemic legislation failures that particular cases, such as the one being researched, are allowed to occur.

The ADS11 field trip will focus on filming on location in Blackpool as an introductory workshop to conduct research documentary film. The workshop will focus conceptual filming on location, directing, cinematography, and sound design. There will be a strong emphasis on maximising conceptual capture to allow flexibility in moulding a narrative in the editing and post production process.

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 and animation process where a series of mixed media – combining real footage with animation, performative acts, photography and computer generated imagery – visual essays will be developed.

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)

Tutors:

Francisco Lobo and Romea Muryń are the founders of LOCUMENT – a research studio that combines filmmaking with architecture and urban 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 envisions the future and the past, and not the least, our time.

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) and Rotterdam Architecture Film Festival (Netherlands). They have collaborated with institutions such as MIT Architecture Department (Cambridge, US), INDA - Chulalongkorn University Faculty of Architecture (Thailand), Amsterdam University of Arts, Academy of Architecture, The Bartlett School of Architecture (Netherlands), Bartlett Prospective (UK) and FAVUT Faculty of Architecture in Brno.

www.thelocument.com

Christopher Sejer Fischlein is a London-based architect and 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 that sheds light on the entangled trans-corporeal routes and intra-actions between site-specific chemical contaminations and human bodies within water systems. Additionally, he is a lecturer in design at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

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

www.fischlein.co.uk