Toxic Commons

Toxicity_Boris Anje, Selfie Series, acrylic on canvas, 2017
Toxcitiy ©Boris Anje

"Share the Bliss, Share the Burden"

Toxic commons is a platform that writes texts, organizes public programs and acts as a body of research in and around toxic dissemination and the environmental injustice inherent to it. It is born out of a shared and interdisciplinary appeal to better understand and shed light on the fact that certain humans, non-humans and in the long run, the earth system as a whole, bare the burden of its intensifying spread. Smog in every major city, rivers stained with oil spills, and public greens lost to industrial development —people all over the world face the dire realities of living in polluted environments. Often we discuss these environmental problems in a localized context but actually, they diffuse across the globe with different outcomes. However, as the elusive nature of the toxic is often hard to grasp and represent, and even more so, because the violence that it spreads is so slow and unspectacular, it is crucial to approach the subject via an interdisciplinary lens. Toxic Commons therefore want to strengthen and enable the collaboration between visual artists, cultural producers and scientific researchers around the complex relation between the causes and effects of toxic movement, as well as give space to its implicit contradictions.

Toxic Commons is founded by: Caroline Ektander, Antonia Alampi and the Hazardous Travels research group.