TOXX

‘toxicity [Is] an animated, active, and peculiarly queer agent’

- MEL CHEN

TOXX is a single-channel meditation on microbial migrations and the choreographies of change in an era of escalating toxicity. It wonders at a planetary inheritance of industrial residue, confronting the grotesque figurations of earth's present and the uncanny futures that might evolve from it. As studies identify microplastics in clouds, air pollution particles in placentas, and PFAS ‘forever’ chemicals in oceans, tap water and 90% of human breast milk across the world, the porous progeny of the Toxicocene find themselves united in contamination across every cell, site, and species. Resisting the urge to withdraw from the disquiet of such intimate incursions, the eco-monstrous figures of TOXX invite us to linger in the disquiet of post-normal narratives, refusing the convenience of utopic/dystopic binaries to instead favour the morphic muck of transition without the expectation of arrival. The Toxicocene offers no apocalypse, no salvific future, only the motley miasma of bodies seeping, blooming, metabolising and mutating in transition, unceasing—a toxomythology without end.

TOXX was first presented at the Center for Projection Art and Bunjil Place for the Body-Cites program as a part of FRAME: A BIENNIAL OF DANCE 2023. It has since been programmed by the City of Hobart as a part of the Hobart Current biennial exhibition to screen at Loop Gallery for Epoch: Loop, and by Interface Video Art Festival in Croatia. The text that features in the video has subsequently been published by the Center for Projection art here - and more thinking on the Toxicocene was published by Swamphen Journal of Cultural Ecology here.

You can see the original program listing for TOXX here, and read a brief review of TOXX here.

Single Channel: 15:00 min

Sound composition: Stephanie Speirs

Performance: Tamsyn Heynes

Artistic Assistance: Jess Ngaio