We are pollutants. Since the Industrial Revolution, countless synthetic substances have started floating, flowing, melting, infecting, disrupting or dwelling within and around us. These pollutants did not exist before and will not now disappear. Quite the opposite. There is a pressing need to map these pollutants in order to understand the roles of modernity and urbanisation in disseminating them across the Earth. Even if ‘recycling’ processes are meant to make ‘dirty’ matter ‘clean,’ most of these chemical compounds are indestructible and will continue to circulate across rivers, soil, groundwater, air, cities, buildings, factories and human and non-human matter.

Working under the effects of a pandemic, a health crisis that is first and foremost an environmental crisis, the students of ADS3 examined compounds such as sulphur, calcium, polyethylene, teargas and vanadium as a point of departure for understanding how we metabolise the built environment. Through mapping, drawing, modelling or film the graduate students portray the ways by which this substance has been absorbed by different bodies and, as a result, changed the ecologies in and around us. Following its chemical and metabolic pathways, these substances have been transformed into a site-specific project and intervention.

Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe