Chemical Intimacies: Thinking with Toxic Media

In Intoxicated, Mel Y. Chen writes, “toxicity rearranges matter,” drawing attention to the complex ways chemical intimacies reshape lifeworlds. This panel solicits papers that consider the stakes of this rearrangement for practices and histories of art. Synthetic chemicals are pervasive in modern and contemporary life, simultaneously providing myriad life-sustaining functions and contaminating, breaking down, and persisting in bodies and landscapes. Articulating these ambivalent proximities, Michelle Murphy offers the concept of “alterlife,” which encapsulates life already and perpetually altered, as well as collectivities, both human and more-than-human, that are continually recomposed by industrial capitalism’s petrochemical infrastructures. Following Chen and Murphy, we can understand chemical relations today as troubled intimacies that disrupt categories of individual and other, nature and culture. Studying chemical intimacies invites analyses of the material exchanges between human and more-than-human, and of the enmeshment of life within racial and settler-colonial capitalism. As an analytic, chemical intimacy illuminates life as distributed and intra-active; it links the local and global, prompting investigations of sites of material extraction, chemical synthesis, supply chains, and sacrifice zones.

We solicit papers from scholars and practitioners concerned with the intimacies between synthetic materials, bodies and landscapes, and their attendant histories of production, consumption, and waste. We encourage presentations that engage with the entanglements of toxic media from interdisciplinary perspectives, including ecofeminist and queer ecological theory, disability studies, Black and Indigenous studies, and science studies. Together, we ask how an attention to chemical intimacies might foster modes of unlearning and worldmaking within art history and practice.