Drawing attention to the toxicity engendered by conventional American corpse disposal methods, my research has begun to explore cemeteries as visual archives that demonstrate how hegemonic conceptualizations of the human are constituted through toxicity. Modern cemeteries are typically thought to be orderly, verdant spaces that aim to cultivate aesthetics of serenity - a far cry from the colors, textures, and spectacle that we typically imagine when we visualize “toxic places.” However, resource-intensive techniques to delay decay and sequester dead bodies from the supposed ‘defilement’ of bacteria, soil, and nonhuman animals annually result in the internment of over 4 million tons of concrete, wood, steel, and carcinogenic embalming chemicals. These internments rarely stay put, leading to formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, phenol, humectants, dyes, and antiedemic chemicals gradually seeping into the soil and underground waterways that constitute America’s water table. Slowly transforming cemeteries into invisible landfills below ground and out of sight (World Health Organization 1998; Nixon 2013), these toxic interventions uphold binaries of self/other and their attendant violence by inhibiting the complete incorporation of corpses into subterranean, more-than-human worlds. Delving into the relationship to this particular form of pollution and liberal post-enlightenment ideas of the embodied human subject, I aim to think through the ways toxicities are not simply “wayward particles behaving badly” (Murphy 2006), but structures of relation fundamentally shaped by the ways we define, memorialize, and monumentalize the human’s place within the world as one of mastery and control. What structures of feeling does toxicity mobilize in relation to death and memory? *The following series of photographs are composed of found images overlaid with graphic illustrations. This represents a common technique of mine to either draw field sites or illustrate on top of images to focus my own attention on certain themes or points of interest. Here, I am interested in logics and textures (both seen and unseen) as a way to complicate the assumed “truth” of the photographic image as a way to “know” toxicity. Most of what I describe in the following images cannot be fully apprehended through traditional approaches to visuality.
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