01
Encountering the Cenote: A Feminist Hydrogeology for the Anthropocene
Cenotes emerge from a situated entanglement of elements: water, mineral, rock, earth. They encompass multiple scales: from the microscopic to the planetary; from distant geological time to the present. What can engaging with the material specificity of cenotes teach us about the relationship between humans and the geologic in the age of the Anthropocene?
Situated at the intersection of overlapping interdisciplinary research, this project draws on feminist environmental humanities, geohumanities, human geography, and science and technology studies (STS) to demonstrate how scuba diving in cenotes is a fruitful method of enquiry. An engagement with radical liminalities, scuba diving generates bodily knowledges beneath the water, shifting normative ontological understandings toward more complex modes of being in the Anthropocene.
02
Toxic Embodiment and Chemical Exposures in Ventanas: A Remediation of Chile’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’
In this project, my collaborator Elizabeth Burmann and I dive into the waters of Ventanas, a beach town and "sacrifice zone" on the coast of Chile. For more than fifty years the town has been permeated with the toxic discharges of Ventanas Industrial Park, whose industries and thermoelectric plants operate a few metres from the coast.
The contamination has profoundly impacted the local ecosystem and residents' health, leading to failed sea farming attempts, economic downturns, and the closure of sea farms. In response, Ventanas has become a center for political and social activism, culminating in the planned closure of Codelco's last thermoelectric plant by 2027. Central to this study is the concept of "toxic embodiment," which interrogates the intersection of environmental violence with power relations, including racism, settler-colonial violence, corporate greed, and militarism.
We turn to Ventanas to interrogate the transcorporeal interchanges between the ocean, industry contaminants, and the human and non-human bodies of the residents of Ventanas. Through a multi-modal approach that includes community-based art projects, participatory installations, and local activism, we examine the toxic exposures and entanglements of Ventanas.
Drawing on feminist STS and the environmental humanities, we frame this enquiry as a remediation of Ventanas. Remediation in environmental theory refers to the act of remedying or reversing environmental damage. In media studies and in our own scholarship, remediation has been defined as "layers of mediations" (Tien and Burmann, 2022, p.80) that comprise a situated understanding of the world.
We remediate Ventanas through our practice to draw attention to the specific materialities and situated politics of environmental urgency. We do so in order to imagine how we might reshape approaches nourishment and transcorporeal connection in a more ethical way, reorienting our fraught relationship to the ocean and to the environment.
(visit https://elizabethburmann.com/ for more information on Elizabeth’s artistic, academic and sculptural practice)
The contamination has profoundly impacted the local ecosystem and residents' health, leading to failed sea farming attempts, economic downturns, and the closure of sea farms. In response, Ventanas has become a center for political and social activism, culminating in the planned closure of Codelco's last thermoelectric plant by 2027. Central to this study is the concept of "toxic embodiment," which interrogates the intersection of environmental violence with power relations, including racism, settler-colonial violence, corporate greed, and militarism.
We turn to Ventanas to interrogate the transcorporeal interchanges between the ocean, industry contaminants, and the human and non-human bodies of the residents of Ventanas. Through a multi-modal approach that includes community-based art projects, participatory installations, and local activism, we examine the toxic exposures and entanglements of Ventanas.
Drawing on feminist STS and the environmental humanities, we frame this enquiry as a remediation of Ventanas. Remediation in environmental theory refers to the act of remedying or reversing environmental damage. In media studies and in our own scholarship, remediation has been defined as "layers of mediations" (Tien and Burmann, 2022, p.80) that comprise a situated understanding of the world.
We remediate Ventanas through our practice to draw attention to the specific materialities and situated politics of environmental urgency. We do so in order to imagine how we might reshape approaches nourishment and transcorporeal connection in a more ethical way, reorienting our fraught relationship to the ocean and to the environment.
(visit https://elizabethburmann.com/ for more information on Elizabeth’s artistic, academic and sculptural practice)
03
Thinking-With Decorator Crabs
Drawing on feminist environmental humanities, material feminisms and the oceanic turn, this project draws on concepts such as transcorporeality to consider how rising ocean acidification affects all bodies, including our own. Through sustained engagement with the decorator crabs, including their movements, gestures, and practices of self-decoration, we reflect on the material and affective exchanges that emerge in shared aquatic environments.
Rather than offering the aquarium as a site of containment, we propose it as a space of remediation, where meaning, matter, and relation are reconfigured. Remediation here signals not just ecological repair, but a layered, situated process of reimagining our responsibilities to marine worlds. In attending closely to these crabs, we hope to cultivate a more embodied, ethical approach to the oceanic, one that dissolves the boundaries between species, disciplines, and forms of knowledge.
Developed through an academic-artistic collaboration, this project took shape through a combination of writing, filming, and close observation. It reflects our shared interest in how artistic and scholarly practices might work together to imagine more careful, attentive ways of relating to watery worlds.
(visit https://elizabethburmann.com/ for more information on Elizabeth’s artistic, academic and sculptural practice)
04
Human-Microbial Relations (Kids, Bugs, and Drugs)
My role in the project focuses on the second domain: young people’s emerging understandings of the microbial world. Through interviews and photograph-elicitation, we examine how microbiology students engage with the invisible life around them, exploring how they carry microbial thinking beyond the petri dish and into their everyday lives. We investigate the messy and often unexpected ways scientific knowledge moves through bodies and social worlds alike, shaping how we imagine health, risk, and the microbial life.
(visit https://www.kidsbugsanddrugs.org/ for more information on the project, and Katherine Kenny’s profile (https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/katherine-kenny.html) for more information on her academic work)