I am honored to have an article “Contaminated Representations” included in this month’s special issue of e-flux dealing with the Settler Colonial Present. It is a great collection of papers, including an editorial by Andrew Herscher and Ana María León, “Sitting Bull’s Log Cabin and Settler Commons in Chicago” by Andrea Carlson and Rozalinda Borcilă, “Sustainability as Plantation Logic, Or, Who Plots an Architecture of Freedom?” by K. Wayne Yang, and “Indigenous Architectural Design Guides in Chile” by Eliseo Huencho
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/the-settler-colonial-present/352059/contaminated-representations/
The Deceptive Tranquility of Settler Colonial Landscapes
One of the ways in which settler colonialism operates is by concealing its logics in seemingly objective data about contaminated land. There are two distinct but linked logics of representation of the landscape at play here. First is the portrayal of landscapes as tranquil, neutral, and quiet. This concealment can take place at the scale of bodily experience. Walking through sites where pollution dwells quietly below the surface, there may be no markers, or at least no markers that can appropriately convey the scale, extent, and drama of the contamination. Second is the use of data and numbers to obfuscate the truths represented in that very data (an obfuscation that typically excludes any understandable visualization of that data). These representations use abstract terms and abbreviations. Many people struggle to understand what things like PCBs or PPM mean or how they relate to phenomena witnessed in everyday life. Exhaustion sets in as people struggle to make any sense of objective datasets. These representations, then, might provoke despondency or a sense of helplessness and are not likely to lead to action.
