In and Out of the Toxic Zone: An Immersive Experience with Sounds, Visuals and Words

How do we encounter pollution in the modern world? Can we feel it? What is the role of perception, representation, and narratives in making sense of changing ecologies? Can pollution be made tangible through images, sounds and stories? And how do we make it politically relevant? The Center for Applied Ecological Thinking (CApE) invites you to experience and ponder these questions in a performative art event on 21 January 2025.

We will host three interrelated interventions that delve into the relationship between art, narratives and politics in the context of toxic ecologies, in Denmark and elsewhere, followed by a panel discussion.

Guests will be welcomed by the soundscape of 'You Were Never Here' created by Klapjagt for this event. Behind the moniker, is artist and composer Korana Jelača. Klapjagt is centred around the physicality of sound and sound as an architectural device. Consisting solely of field recordings, the project is an exploration of the random and volatile nature of (primarily urban) landscapes and our perception of them. While immersed in the soundscape, two screens will show the landscape paintings that were hanging in the offices of Nordic Waste, provided by the artist Brian Kure, who purchased them at the auction following the company's bankruptcy and which were exhibited at the AGA studios in Copenhagen in June 2024 accompanied by a text by Malte Tellerup. The bankruptcy happened when Nordic Waste owners dissolved the company to avoid paying for the cleanup work after a landslide of toxic soil destroyed the waste facility due to poor management in December 2023. The paintings reveal uncanny insights into the perception of nature and how it was managed in Ølst Bakker in the years leading up to the landslide. Seamlessly, the event will continue with a visual and narrative performance by CApE researcher Salvatore Paolo De Rosa, who will guide the audience on a journey through the layered and contradictory timelines of waste pollution and climate breakdown, searching for trajectories of escape from the end of times. Partly autobiography, partly conceptual reflection, partly a call to arms, the performance begins in a town in Southern Italy and ends on the frontlines of the battles to come.

We will then host a panel with Korana, Brian and Salvatore, who will tell us more about their respective works and discuss with the audience the relationship between art, narratives and politics in the context of pollution and the ecological crisis.

Finally, after the event, we invite the audience to share some drinks and snacks and to take time to socialize.

Please sign up for the event

About the event series

The Narratives and the Politics of Toxic Ecologies

This autumn, the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking invites you to a series of four public events on toxic ecologies, in which we’ll explore different ways of narrating and experiencing waste, pollution and contamination, and discuss the political dimensions of toxification and the resistance to it.

From PFAS to microplastics, from carbon to chemical byproducts, the world is increasingly wrapped in the scraps of industrial capitalism. Toxicity not only insinuates landscapes, ecosystems, water, air and bodies; it also affects imaginaries, psychologies and meanings. Contamination is distributed unequally, giving rise to environmental injustices. It creates social and ecological costs but also it is often the result of shifted or displaced economic costs: from private companies onto human and non-human bodies.

Public regulation struggles to contain, manage and remediate toxic sites and widespread pollution. The relative invisibility of contamination and its complex biochemical interactions with organisms often prevent democratic oversight. Yet, it has never been more necessary to augment society’s capacity to understand – in mind and feelings – toxification and its relationship with industrial modernity, to work out the narratives and the politics that can help us prevent the world from going to waste and support the dire needs for justice, reparation and regeneration.

In this series, through different media and approaches, we will delve into toxic ecologies both in Denmark and elsewhere, to confront the questions of how we know and how we act in a polluted global environment.