bodily burden

bodily burden features a constellation of six short films that are entangled by breath as a means of understanding the relationship between the climate crisis and the permeable bodies and environments that are radically altered through the toxic accumulations of extractive industry. How do we begin to process such entanglements, particularly as many forms of pollution are invisible, silent, and scentless? The contributors to this program share filmic strategies to contend with environmental harm and the rise in chronic illness and disability, working with elements of experimental documentary, speculative fiction, personal storytelling, and theatrical performance. Although bodily burden is shot through with grief and loss, there are occasional glimmers of humour and absurdity, too.

These works traverse distinct locales, beginning in a swirl of smog and particulate matter in Edmonton through Christina Battle’s the air we breathe, a film whose tendrils are also tied to Ontario’s “Chemical Valley”—grounding the program in a Canadian context. Kym McDaniel’s film Document with No End brings viewers to the American Southwest, anchored by the “Environmental Nuclear Bomb” that is Utah’s Great Salt Lake—a site in which increasing drought has exposed polluted sediment, contributing to airborne arsenic and heavy metals as well as historic nuclear testing during the 1950s with its impact on downwind communities. Through questions about the entanglement of harmful corporations and arts funding or art governance, Theo Cuthand also homes in on Chemical Valley, considering the health impacts of the petrochemical industry on the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Less Lethal Fetishes. With Sabīne Šnē’s video work, Caves of Our Insides, the program zooms out from these specific contexts to sit with the planetary relationships of the more-than-human through the element of iron. bodily burden closes in the toxic ruins of an open-pit mine in Veta Grande Zacatecas, Mexico with Naomi Rincón-Gallardo’s Sangre pesada (Heavy Blood). While breath moves throughout the entirety of the program, there is an intentional and gradual movement from the skies of Battle’s opening work to the ground beneath our feet with Šnē and Rincón-Gallardo. 

The health impacts of the nuclear-industrial complex, mining operations, petrochemical processing, military manufacturing and chemical warfare–all subjects that weave through this program—attack every system of the body, yet the biological impacts are often hard to prove. The writer and activist Sunaura Taylor’s concept of “disabled ecology” is central to bodily burden as a way of describing the networks of human and more-than-human disablement that are created when ecosystems are profoundly altered by various industries. Throughout the program, there are ripples of recognition that the distribution of these effects stem from environmental racism and Indigenous land dispossession, which inform the location of industrial sites alongside the determinants of gender and class. Just as the so-called “sacrifice zones” absorb the slow violence of polluting industries, the remediation of more-than-human worlds will be an intergenerational responsibility. Certain contaminants operate beyond the scale of human time—as in the case of PFAs or “forever chemicals” or the billion-year half-life of uranium. Pollution has a temporal element, just as these films weave together past, present, and future.