In the recent Forensic Architecture (FA) exhibition ‘Cloud Studies’ at The Whitworth Gallery (2 July–17 October 2021), the FA team pose the question: ‘If toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down?’. The multidisciplinary research group FA conducted a recent investigation, commissioned by the Whitworth and the 2021 Manchester International Festival, in order to study environmental racism along an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi river in Louisiana (United States), situated between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Known as the ‘petrochemical corridor’, the area contains two thousand industrial facilities that produce some of North America’s most toxic air. As a result of this disturbing situation, the region was nicknamed ‘cancer alley’ by environmental-justice activists in the 1980s. Residents of the area – who can smell these fumes in their homes – have suffered from poor health over decades. The area is equally inhospitable to plants, and residents have noticed that vegetation is unable to grow.
Racism has been a fixture of the state of Louisiana, beginning in 1775, when European settler colonists occupied lands, historically inhabited by the indigenous Houma people, and forcibly displaced this population. This fertile land was later subdivided into long and narrow gridded units to accommodate the cash crop of sugarcane along the Mississippi river. The intensive labour needed to produce this notoriously dangerous crop was forcibly secured through the transatlantic slave trade. These sites instituted a regime of racial segregation, incarceration, surveillance and forced labour to maximise productivity and profit – dynamics that were foundational to North American capitalism. After the formal emancipation of enslaved people in the U.S. in 1863, these landscapes underwent great change followed by ever-expanding industrial development. Notably, despite the abolition of slavery, Black people continued to suffer structural racism in a multitude of ways including Jim Crow Laws, which enforced racial segregation in the South between 1877 and the 1950s. Racism manifested in the very way the land was configured after the Civil War, as the Freedmen’s Bureau made numerous small land grants to some of the families of newly emancipated former slaves. However, the larger plantations remained in the possession of the white owners. As such, these larger blocks of land were rapidly redeveloped for petrochemical production around the turn of the twentieth century.
In the exhibition’s video installation, If toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down? (2021), FA interrogates the ways these violent histories and practices of racism have extended into the present and manifest environmentally. The video began by surveying former plantation sites through the technique of ‘cartographic regression’, enabling viewers to see the way the land has been developed and changed throughout the years. The video layered topographic documentation of the region including aerial footage captured from 1940s to the present day and, prior to the existence of this technology, maps of the region since the 1700s. The latter include a 1719 chart of indigenous Houma territories used by colonists and a manuscript edition of US Coast Survey mapping the Mississippi River from Point Houmas to New Orleans from 1874–1877. Today these fields are home to petrochemical refineries built by companies that have acquired and re-developed the land. Tragically, as the video demonstrates, the presence of cemeteries for the formerly enslaved was ignored by these industrialising owners and corporations, despite laws protecting such sites. The companies running these petrochemical plants then not only pollute the air in areas where the Black descendants of formerly enslaved people live in closest proximity to the refineries – and thus are most impacted by pollution – but have also erased burial sites which hold crucial cultural, historical, and memorial value to the region’s communities. The ‘cartographic mosaics’ created through FA’s mapping techniques have sought to identify probable locations of these cemeteries. Within these cartographic representations, potential graves are identified as ‘anomalies’ in the topographic agricultural landscape – evidenced by, for example, patches of uncultivated land or clusters of trees. FA is working with RISE St. James, a fence-line community activist organisation in St. James, Louisiana, to carry out this research and confront environmental and industrial racism.1
Reflecting on the question framing FA’s exhibition – ‘If toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down?’ – the issue of violence comes to the fore. In 1969 – in an observation that infuriatingly rings just as true today – the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung aptly described ‘structural violence’ as a phenomenon that often seems ‘as about as natural as the air around us’.2 More recently, scholar Rob Nixon coined the term ‘slow violence to describe a practice that is often invisible in nature yet has very tangible impacts.3 Whilst today there is common understanding that slavery and its horrific forms of violence is fundamentally wrong, the ‘slow’ structural violence wrought by air pollution has not been as directly contested. Given the delayed temporality and more opaque manifestations of this violence, it is much harder to hold companies and individuals to account for the foreshortened lives and other psychological and bodily sufferings caused by petrochemical refining in Louisiana. The region’s Black communities deserve accountability and ecological reparations.
With the recent Cop26 talks, India’s worryingly high air pollution levels, and widespread concerns that not enough is being done to tackle the climate and ecological crisis, campaigners have begun calling for the recognition of ‘ecocide’ by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). ‘Cloud Studies’ puts on display one particular manifestation of ‘ecocide’ that worryingly bypasses politicians who too easily deny the existence of such injustices and violence. Thus, it seems necessary for us to recognise these ecological disasters and their modalities of ‘slow violence’ within the eyes of the law, in order to begin seeing justice enacted and accountability held. FA’s investigations – made in collaboration with RISE St. James – work towards this cause by bringing visibility to lethal airborne pollutants and searching for traces of erased Black cemeteries in the archives of cartographic documentation and the land itself.
1 A community that neighbours industrial facilities.
2 Thom Davies, ‘Structural violence and toxic geographies: ‘Out of sight’ to whom?’, Sage Journals, 2019, 2-5
3 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, 2011, 2.
Dispatches in Art History 