Paper short abstract:

Through critical and artistic research, I will unpack the Western colonial imaginaries of restoration and repair that inadvertently work to achieve idyllic bodies and landscapes using the Toronto Port Lands as a case study.

Paper long abstract:

I am an artist with invisible chronic illnesses that developed while I lived on a mass of land built out of Toronto’s waste at the edge of Lake Ontario called the Port Lands. While seeking medical care, I witnessed attempts to heal the Port Lands. In a purification project the City of Toronto has called “Naturalizing the Port Lands”, two million cubic meters of contaminated soil are being excavated or washed in order to restore the land to its supposedly original state. The contaminated earth can’t be disposed of- only moved elsewhere. I will critically unpack the Western colonial imaginaries of restoration and repair that inadvertently work to achieve idyllic bodies and landscapes, using the washing of the Port Lands soil as a case study and a metaphor for cleansing the body.

Environmental scholars argue that our view of nature is rooted in expectations of what health should look like (Soper, 1995; Betcher, 2015). The treatment of bodies and lands are both enacted through parallel systems of care that aim to reinstate subjects to a particular picture of health rooted in a binary healthy/sick, natural/unnatural. But chronically ill bodies and contaminated lands neither get well nor die, unsettling the idealized visions of repair. Through research and creative practice, my work explores how concepts of “nature” can impact and our relationship to land and bodies. I will unpack how Western colonial imaginaries of restoration and repair present in ecology and geology exhibiting human imagination as an ecological force.