The making of a film about soil remediation in the Parisian suburbs is the basis to reflect on the ambivalent relation between pollution and toxicity, and on reproduction as a grounded multi species process.
Long abstract:
Between 2020 and 2021 I made a short documentary film that follows the quest of neighbors and organizations in a working-class town in the Parisian suburbs to turn a brownfield into fertile ground. The film looks closely at how different people engage with this polluted soil using their bodies, tools, techniques, senses and imagination. Together, the different accounts and practices give a sense of what it means to live, play, work and grow in this toxic land. In this presentation I reflect on the filmmaking process as a space for collaborative theorizing. Filming this documentary provided an opportunity to push the thinking of polluted places in two interesting ways. The first is to consider fertility and toxicity not as opposed but coexisting, in multiple and complicated ways. The second is to attend to fertility and reproduction not as something happening to individual bodies, but as a collective, multispecies process that cannot be properly understood when severed from the land, even when the land is mostly covered by asphalt and concrete.