In 2013, I worked with ethnographic collaborators to visually represent the problematic of lead contamination at the Port of El Callao, Perú. Usually unnoticed in the fray of mining politics, the port presents an unusual but critical site to contemplate the human impacts of extraction through its pervasive condition of toxic exposure. The port is where particulate minerals, mined in the Andes, are transported and stored before being shipped to foreign markets. Leaking trucks, porous storage yards, dusty roads, mineral theft, and corporate-state corruption all contribute to why lead contamination persists in the shantytowns of the port, despite fifteen years of technocratic intervention. The privileging of technical expertise has slowly corroded the political participation of exposed residents, whose knowledge of the situation is often derided by state officials as "too political." At the end of my fieldwork, I conspired with friends of the so-called lead zone to invert this logic by creating a film premised on the assertion that residents offer the technical expertise of direct experience. The approach is thus intentionally not multi-perspectival. The resulting film, currently rough-cut together but slated for minor editing and a new conclusion, attempts to depict the un-depictable: the movement of an invisible substance through an urban space and the human bodies that inhabit it, subject to complex material, political, and symbolic forces. It is entirely narrated and guided by denizens of the lead zone and how they visualize lead within their semiotic-material world.
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