Event Date
Touching Toxicity
This conversation will build off Weston Chien's recent series Touching Toxicity, a body of textile work that maps contamination and remediation across the East Bay. Industrial heavy metals and volatile organic compounds have contaminated the soil and groundwater of the Bay Area, an issue made even more fraught when rising sea levels can push these materials further to the surface. Environmental remediation often focuses on removing the harm wrought by toxicity; sites are returned to a pre-toxic state through the removal or capping of harmful materials. Touching Toxicityconsiders what a framework of return means given larger and longer trends of environmental harm. Together, the panelists will discuss toxicity, remediation, and how artistic and design practice might offer new timescales and tactics for environmental justice.
About just practice
Sophie Weston Chien is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Design at CU Boulder and half of just practice, a collaborative practice with Amanda Ugorji. just practice works across architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, community engagement, textile, and graphic design, alongside activist and organizing work within the design field. Their work considers modes of practice, the spatialization of memory, Black feminist practices, and strategies for collective care. just practice has exhibited at MIT Museum, Yale School of Art, Mills College, and the Boston Public Library Leventhal Map Center.
Credits
Organized by the Maria Manetti Shrem Institute for Sustainable Design, Fashion & Textiles, co-sponsored by the Department of Science and Technology Studies.
Questions? Contact Kayleigh Perkov at [email protected]