each incandescent color unlike: sulfur, blood, ice,
coral, fire-gold, violet the hue of shaman robes—
every flower with its unique glint or slant, faithful
to each particular. All things lit by what they neighbor
but are not, each tint flaring without a human soul,
without human rage at its passing.
– Suji Kowck Kim, ‘The Korean Community Garden at Queens’
No roads lead to the waste plant.
The wheels of our car tread on naked, bruised land that rises around us in clouds of dust. Our coated eyes have been pursuing the horizon where the two towers billow smoke into a plain, dull sky. The GPS on our phone points northward.
The route is a rough lane sluiced by discontinuous aluminium fences that are only a few feet high, punctured by anarchic shrubbery and irregular security guards. Beyond these fences, there is a vast swath of land on which something is being built; this might be the biomethanation plant which was promised a few years ago. The waste plant churns next to it.
There is a sense that we are witnessing an anatomy lesson in progress; a rabid Duchampian The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. Here, the tissue of a cadaver peeled to reveal its scaffolding. Row after row of construction debris blending with small mounds of dirt and plastic waste. There, an organ protrudes from the body of the waste plant, a petiole extending in agony, expunging its salts into the air.
In Chernobyl Prayer, Svetlana Alexeivich asks: ‘How many times has art rehearsed the apocalypse, offered different technological versions of doomsday?’ [1]
This question rings in my ears when we arrive at the large gates of the waste plant at Okhla, New Delhi. We have been anointed by this patch of the earth, it sits as a film on us, with a merciful lightness. There is a tattered sign that reads ‘Ecopolis’, the colours on the flex are tinted with the hue of dust. A guard surveys the sling of my camera bag and informs us that photography is prohibited. We are redirected to another entrance where someone will speak to us. The wheels of our car finally touch gravel, and we realise this is the entry for the workers of the plant. It is neat and proportionate. The gates we had approached earlier were meant for large vehicles, mainly municipal collection trucks carrying waste from the city, their mammoth wheels rolling with an easy dominance over the protrusion and abscesses of an unbuilt route.
We park our car under the shade of a tree that faces a brick wall where someone has painted, in faded yellow letters the Hindi word for warning: Khatra (Danger). We approach the gate and speak to the security guards stationed there, filling out a register with our bare markers: name, purpose, contact number.
No one at the waste plant can speak to us, we must write an email. You should check the website. It has everything you need to know.
On our way back, a little farther from the waste plant and opposite a residential locality, we spot a giant mound. Teens are lounging around it, some are playing cricket a few steps away. This wasn’t here before, I am told. This is just earth, dug-up and then piled somewhere thoughtlessly. And now it is a part of the landscape, as natural and forever as the sky.
I am reminded of the miners who dug the quartzite stones of Aravalli Hills that made the city of Delhi modern in the twentieth century—a modernity built on the relentless carving of the earth. In Mohammad Talib’s interviews with generations of quarry workers reverberated a voice: ‘Pattheron mein hamara janam hua, pattheron mein jeeten hain, isi ki roti khatey hain’ (We were born amidst stones, live in them, and get our bread from them). [2]
All that is solid melts into rubble.
When I board the metro rail that will take me home, I keep the towers of the waste plant in my line of sight; they rise as a wayward Gulliver above the roofs and terraces of countless neighbourhoods. I can follow them from the windows of the train as it races on pillars from Jasola Vihar until a few stations down to Sukhdev Vihar. The towers are unceasing in their labour—emitting a constant stream of grey smoke that is distinguishable until it dissolves into everything. The metro plunges underground, and I close my eyes.
II. Pyromania
bricks
cocunut shells
footwear
cloths
tarpaulin
large plastic
There are three landfills in the city of New Delhi. In 2016, one of them was on fire for a week. [3]
This was the year I realised that air is subdivided into particulate matter. Air, that thing not of sight, took the form of a muggy grey waft which hung oppressively in my room. I could grasp, for the first time, the appearance of matter that was coursing through my nasal passages and into my lungs with each breath. Refuse from the city, in all its material variance—wood, plastic, glass, cloth—was burning uncontrollably, and winds were dispersing these fumes beyond the radial limits of the dumping sites. This was no seasonal deposit into the body. Rather, it was a constant siege, the surge in its compositional toxicity revealed starkly and undeniably in moments of extremity.
Pollution was a public problem with teeth back then though as a policy issue it was kept at a distance from waste. Air quality index was published in newspapers, not tracked on the screens of phones or privately owned purifying devices. Photographs of the smog which slumbered over the city of Delhi were circulated on television screens. And the city continued to wade through it, blinking its way to work each hour of the day. I feel a punch in the gut when Tiffany Sia writes: ‘Crisis news is a genre film.’ [4] A freeze frame one can walk out of or scroll over, a mediatic carousel that numbs the intimacy of discharge.
We are lulled by the lure of ‘dirty pictures’, a term used by Susan Schuppli to describe the ‘image-making capacity’ of toxic landscapes. Schuppli is discussing the conjoined status of the image-event in the Anthropocene, such as an oil spill; where the photographic image is not merely representative or deterministic of its apprehension by the public, but that it holds the ability to transform the very field of human vision. In such image-events of the Anthropocene, there is a percussion of light, substance, and stratum which is the toxic ecology acting as a ‘fully realised aesthetic agent’. [5] In the example of air pollutants, a recurring feature in megacities of the ‘global south’ such as New Delhi, the materiality of the photochemical smog ‘alters the optical properties of the atmosphere such that the way we actually see is modified along with the thing itself.’ [6] Schuppli pays attention to two simultaneous processes: the transformation of sensory fields in human actors by toxic landscapes, and the extra-sensorial registers of change that matter bears. To be witness to the Anthropocene, to be alive in this arc is to ask: What are constitutional trajectories that wastes of varied kinds hold? What imprints are held in them?
The landfill that was on fire is located in a part of New Delhi known as Bhalswa. It reached its capacity in 2007, nearly a decade before the fire. Incidents of fire and collapsing of waste mounds has led to fatalities and destruction of informal colonies that dot the periphery of this landfill along with another at Ghazipur. Since it began in 1984, among the earliest landfills in the city, Bhalswa holds ‘legacy waste’—degrading refuse from times past. ‘Trommel’, a cylindrical sieve that rotates and separates larger sized objects from smaller ones, is used to sort legacy waste at these landfills. Yet as that wheel turns, fresh waste arrives every day—the cycle of wasted time cannot keep pace.
Carboniferous capitalism wants us to believe that waste becomes productive energy, what Bourriaud calls the ‘exform’. [7]
A thing depleted of its commodity function and stripped of use value is discarded before arriving at plants that transform them into heat. The incinerator-boiler is where solid waste transforms to slurry, then fly ash. The heat from this incineration fires the belly of the city, powering engines and factories, railroads and commercial complexes. But this is not the whole truth. That more waste arrives at dumpsites and treatment plants than their capacity or permissibility to process, ensures there is always an ample supply of detritus that is out of place, and out of time. The wheel of waste to energy can’t keep up with the velocity of consumption circuits. The more amalgamated representations of waste circulate, the more abstract each item in that group becomes, losing its potent particularity. The more we are asked to fixate on static piles and mounds, the less we can see their diffusive lifeworlds, their radical refusal to behave.
Legacy waste is unpredictable.
It is resistantly unique, it bears traces of lifestyles that have withered under the rapid pace of change. One method of dealing with legacy waste is called bio capping—which quite literally involves placing layers of soil and plants as a cover to level a waste site. Capping does not reduce contamination or toxicity, it merely conceals it with grass and repurposes dumpsites into parks, the land deemed unfit for permanent habitation.
Legacy waste is active, traversing new states of being.
It alters all neighbouring matter in ways such as subsidence—the caving of the dump which could bring down any structures built atop it; release of leachate, a contaminated liquid composition of degrading materials that could include heavy metals such as mercury, phenol, ammonia nitrogen compounds, all of which seep into groundwater; and the emanation of toxic gases. Waste sites are remnants of what McKenzie Wark describes as the ‘liquid world of industrial second nature’ under capitalism: ‘a built environment that no longer follows and forms the contours and topos of the land but rather transforms them into an abstract topographic plane.’ [8] A way to subvert these effects is biomining—the further extraction of resources such as plastic, rubber, textile, glass, from legacy waste; incinerating all that is combustible and, at least on the surface, closing the life cycle of waste. Yet biomining doesn’t reclaim everything. Since 2019, the ‘inert material’ that cannot be processed into soil through biomining at Bhalswa gets dumped at a site in Badarpur, a densely and continuously populated district of Delhi since the sixteenth century. The waste plant and the landfill are ever-expanding, sprouting in neighbourhoods around Delhi. I have to wonder whether a landfill or an incinerator are the greenhouses of extractive capitalism, sites that must constantly seek newer outposts, be guarded by sentries that protect the pyromantic alchemies of creative destruction?
I am reminded of Alexievich’s description of the Shelter Object at Chernobyl—a steel and concrete sarcophagus built to contain the radioactive emissions from reactor unit 4—as a corpse that still has breath, leaking radioactive isotopes from the gaps in its assembly. The Shelter Object is a blindfold writ large, imploring us to look away or bury beneath, all that appears dangerous.
In 2014, residents of Sukhdev Vihar woke up every morning to a snowfall of fly ash, which settled on their rooftops; a sediment generated from the Okhla waste plant. The epoch of waste does not remain inertly around us, but is vividly present within us, in gestures of perceptual shifts or habitual accretions. In the past year, as a pandemic confined us to the domestic, I took to gazing at the sky, generating a stream of pictures that captured cloud formations, wisps interrupted by an occasional sparrow or two. Each day, I label the pictures: Cirrus, Cumulus, Status and so on. In these pictures, the blue of the sky is tinged with a shade John Ruskin would have called sallow. I do not remember how my patch of sky looked before this.
III. Tender Alchemies
We are post-purity, we are mercury, arsenic, lead. How, and upon whom do we perform the litmus test of sanity?
In a survey of radioactive photography from Chernobyl, Kate Brown reports on the changed landscape following the eruption. ‘The lava eventually cooled to stalactites, black, sparkling, and impenetrable.’ These stalactites emit roentgens, radioactive matter, exposure to which could cause symptoms ranging from dizziness and nausea, to haemorrhage and death. Brown is examining the work of Sergei Koshelev and Aleksander Kupny, who have photographed the site of Chernobyl, entering the sarcophagus from two cavern-like points. Even as their bodies accumulate doses of radioactivity, their photographs hold flickers that Brown describes as ‘self-portraits’ by decaying isotopes—artificial matter created in laboratories, ‘strontium, cesium, plutonium, uranium.’ ‘These points of light are not representations. They are energy embodied.’ [9]
To consider these speckles on photographic film, the waxen tint of the sky above my home, the tarred filters being pulled out of purifiers every winter, the accrual of contact with waste forms through air, water, land is to think in the realm of traces. Describing the paradigm of witnessing as an impure means of living in the world, Schuppli states that: ‘In forensic science, every contact is perceived as leaving a trace, in forensic imagination every encounter is capable of being retraced.’ [10]
This is a critical reorientation in thinking about waste sites, which have so far been framed in the myths of the Plantation as a distant, contained sphere of action. Yet, as Wendy Wolford reminds us: ‘Plantation boundaries were and are porous. They are literally teeming with life, some of which will be captured as labor but all of which resist complete control by external compulsion (even when internalised).’ [11]
The Okhla waste plant is managed by a private infrastructural wing of the O P Jindal Group, an industrial conglomerate valued at USD 18 billion. Under the project titled ‘Ecopolis’, the Jindal group operates or is in the process of setting up over 8 plants across India. [12] On the Ecopolis website, you can bask in the afterglow of a green future—promises of clean energy, pictures of orderly waste plants with trimmed gardens, and commitments to public welfare. In January 2021, the National Green Tribunal passed an order following reportage of leachates from waste plants and landfills contaminating groundwater in parts of Delhi, including the river Yamuna. Water drawn from handpumps, which are widely in use across settlements and colonies of the city, contain higher than safe levels of phenol, lead, chlorine, nickel, sulphate, Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD). [13] At home, I turn a purifier on every morning to fill up bottles with drinking water, the seamless movement of muscle memory. When M Jaqui Alexander asked, ‘What do lives of privilege look like in the midst of war and the inevitable violence that accompanies the building of empire?’ I think of this moment that starts my day. [14]
The promise of this compound word, ecopolis—an ‘ecologically forward city-state’, a mode of governance where ecology precedes and defines the city—is exactly the kind of empty speak that capital can give us in times of rapid ecocide. Repeatedly, journalistic reports and judicial orders restate the negligence and lack of compliance with measures to guarantee biospheric wellness and public safety at the waste plants. Calls to composting are raised, then swept away. Composting, ‘a material labour whereby old scraps are transformed—through practices of care and attention—into nutrient-rich new soil’, goes against the lens of the state which denies what Latour calls ‘naturecultures’—human life as encumbered, engendered and inextricable from environments.[15] In the sightlines of the state, ‘land’ is a resource when it can be exclusionary, when its occupation or use can be demarcated into legitimate and illegitimate with ‘the inscribing of boundaries through devices such as fences, title deeds, laws, zones, regulations, landmarks and story-lines.’ [16] This is the voice that rings through tribunals and waste management regulations—informal colonies and slums generate desegregated waste and the wasteful use of land. To become green, the city must rationalise who has a right to occupy it. I remember the echoes of quarry workers in Talib’s interviews, the imbrication of their psyche with the rocks, the emotive entanglements they built with stone-work and remind myself:
This is not the only voice.
It is a night in October and I walk through a park somewhere in New Delhi. The battered vein of the concrete walkway that runs through the grass is covered in a moss so green that it feels hallucinatory. That night, as I leave the park, I see the moss on the walls that support a rusted gate, used for entry and exit. Moonlight drapes the walls with a green blanket and I breathe in—smoke, spores, slit, the song of the cicadas, the glimmer of deep time.
Later, I requested a friend to click a picture of the moss in daylight. Rays of light are embedded with ancestral time, travelling from days past and with the power to illuminate the boundlessness of life against linearity. When I scroll through these images, the verdant ground is alive. In inquiries that shift modes of being from ‘bodies of knowledge’ to ‘environments of knowledge’, scholars Donna Haraway and Jennifer Gabrys ‘demonstrate how the embodied and situated encounters we have with visual technologies can provide an entry point for generating other knowledge practices.’ Haraway’s work discusses the Crittercam and Gabrys focuses on Moss Cam—projects that follow the passage of time in non-human biotic and abiotic forms by securing video cameras with motion sensors in marine and greenwood sites. Similar to these projects is the Spillcam, which was a live feed of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill leak site; and in a simpler sense, the webcams which relay corpse flower blooms from botanical centers around the world. In the case of the Moss Cam, the sensors extend the function of the camera to that of an imager, connecting each frame to a dataset of images. This approach considers an image as not a fixed moment in time but a dynamic, processual ‘moment articulated within a larger set of relationships.’ As visual tracking projects generate reams of webcam images and communities of active citizen-scientists who view these, they also ‘produce the possibilities for inhabitations, where mutual embodiment is a process of making worlds’.[17] To the Moss Cam enthusiasts even the disparate pictures from a park in New Delhi could narrate stories of shifts in moisture content in the air, changes in temperature, and the muted embodiment of macro decisions of policy and governance in intimate realities.
I think of the waste plants and how habitats near and far are recording their journey past the projected life cycle of incinerator units into marcescent afterlives. I was warned about the smell: the heady mix of smoke, fly ash and chemicals that floats in the air around Okhla. I remember feeling indifferent to it, inhaling as I had on my way to the plant an assortment of twenty-first century scents: exhaust fumes, vehicular emissions, dust, sanitiser aerosols, the sweetness of winter blooms that lit up hedges in traffic roundabouts. To live in this hour is an exercise in parataxis, sifting through mutinous residues that arrive but refuse to settle; asking repeatedly: yes and?
I look in the shower drain where soil which had stuck to my soles is circling in municipal water.
I note this down as a talisman:
All bodies that exit the rehearsal are depositories.
Notes
[1] Svetlana Alexeivich, Chernobyl Prayer (London: Penguin Books, 2016), 51.
[2] Mohammad Talib, ‘Thinking Through the Stones’ in Writing Labour: Stone Quarry Workers in Delhi (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2012), 37.
[3] Staff Report, ‘Photos: Burning mounds of garbage at Delhi’s Bhalswa landfill exacerbate air pollution crisis in NCR’, Scroll, October 30, 2018, https://scroll.in/article/900227/photos-burning-mounds-of-garbage-at-delhis-bhalswa-landfill-exacerbate-air-pollution-crisis-in-ncr
[4] Tiffany Sia, Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕: The Leak as Discharge (Inpatient Press, 2019), excerpt accessed on Berwick Film & Media Art Festival 2021, https://bfmaf.org/essay/too-salty-too-wet-%E6%9B%B4%E5%92%B8%E6%9B%B4%E6%BF%95-the-leak-as-discharge/
[5] Susan Schuppli, ‘Dirty Pictures’ in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014-2016, eds. Mirna Belina and Arie Altena (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts, 2016). Schuppli builds on Irmgard Emmelhainz’s assertion that the image-centrism of the Anthropocene produces a ‘crisis of visuality, which causes a lack of imagination or even blindness.’ Irmgard Emmelhainz, ‘Conditions of Visuality Under the Anthropocene and Images of the Anthropocene to Come’, E-Flux, vol. 63, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/63/60882/conditions-of-visuality-under-the-anthropocene-and-images-of-the-anthropocene-to-come/
[6] Susan Schuppli, ‘Dirty Pictures’, 204.
[7] Nicolas Bourriaud, The Exform, trans. Erik Butler (London: Verso, 2016).
[8] McKenzie Wark, ‘The Vectoralist Class’, E-Flux, vol. 65, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336347/the-vectoralist-class/
[9] Kate Brown, ‘Marie Curie’s Fingerprint: Nuclear Spelunking in the Chernobyl Zone’ in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, eds. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 41.
[10] Susan Schuppli, Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2020), 9.
[11] Wendy Wolford, ‘The Plantationocene: A Lusotropical Contribution to the Theory’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, vol. 111, 2021, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24694452.2020.1850231
[12] Ecopolis Website, JITF Urban Infrastructure Limited, http://www.jindalecopolis.com/
[13] National Green Tribunal Hearing on Original Application No. 519/2019, January 29, 2021, India Environment Portal, http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/file/dumpsites-Delhi-NGT-order.pdf
[14] M Jaqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 16.
[15] Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities, vol. 10 (2), 2018, https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/10/2/501/136691/Composting-Feminisms-and-Environmental-Humanities
[16] Tania Murray Li, ‘What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment’, Plenary Lecture, Royal Geographic Society, July 14, 2014, https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/tran.12065
[17] Jennifer Gabrys, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-geographies of Experience’ in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 63 - 64.
Arushi Vats writes on arts and culture. Her writing has been published on online platforms such as MARCH: a journal of art & strategy, Alternative South Asia Photography, The Karachi Collective, LSE International History, Critical Collective. She has authored curatorial notes for Galerie Mirchandani Steinruecke, Mumbai; Reliable Copy, Bangalore; and Aicon Contemporary, New York. Her short stories are published in The Gulmohar Quarterly, nether quarterly and Hakara Journal; poetry is forthcoming in PIX Quarterly. She contributed a curatorial essay for a volume on the exhibition The Constitution of India at 70: Celebrate, Illuminate, Rejuvenate, Defend, published by Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust in 2021.
She is the recipient of the Eyebeam Momus Critical Writing Fellowship 2021 – 2022. She lives in New Delhi, India. Her writing can be found at: https://www.arushivats.com/
each incandescent color unlike: sulfur, blood, ice,
coral, fire-gold, violet the hue of shaman robes—
every flower with its unique glint or slant, faithful
to each particular. All things lit by what they neighbor
but are not, each tint flaring without a human soul,
without human rage at its passing.
– Suji Kowck Kim, ‘The Korean Community Garden at Queens’
No roads lead to the waste plant.
The wheels of our car tread on naked, bruised land that rises around us in clouds of dust. Our coated eyes have been pursuing the horizon where the two towers billow smoke into a plain, dull sky. The GPS on our phone points northward.
The route is a rough lane sluiced by discontinuous aluminium fences that are only a few feet high, punctured by anarchic shrubbery and irregular security guards. Beyond these fences, there is a vast swath of land on which something is being built; this might be the biomethanation plant which was promised a few years ago. The waste plant churns next to it.
There is a sense that we are witnessing an anatomy lesson in progress; a rabid Duchampian The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. Here, the tissue of a cadaver peeled to reveal its scaffolding. Row after row of construction debris blending with small mounds of dirt and plastic waste. There, an organ protrudes from the body of the waste plant, a petiole extending in agony, expunging its salts into the air.
In Chernobyl Prayer, Svetlana Alexeivich asks: ‘How many times has art rehearsed the apocalypse, offered different technological versions of doomsday?’ [1]
This question rings in my ears when we arrive at the large gates of the waste plant at Okhla, New Delhi. We have been anointed by this patch of the earth, it sits as a film on us, with a merciful lightness. There is a tattered sign that reads ‘Ecopolis’, the colours on the flex are tinted with the hue of dust. A guard surveys the sling of my camera bag and informs us that photography is prohibited. We are redirected to another entrance where someone will speak to us. The wheels of our car finally touch gravel, and we realise this is the entry for the workers of the plant. It is neat and proportionate. The gates we had approached earlier were meant for large vehicles, mainly municipal collection trucks carrying waste from the city, their mammoth wheels rolling with an easy dominance over the protrusion and abscesses of an unbuilt route.
We park our car under the shade of a tree that faces a brick wall where someone has painted, in faded yellow letters the Hindi word for warning: Khatra (Danger). We approach the gate and speak to the security guards stationed there, filling out a register with our bare markers: name, purpose, contact number.
No one at the waste plant can speak to us, we must write an email. You should check the website. It has everything you need to know.
On our way back, a little farther from the waste plant and opposite a residential locality, we spot a giant mound. Teens are lounging around it, some are playing cricket a few steps away. This wasn’t here before, I am told. This is just earth, dug-up and then piled somewhere thoughtlessly. And now it is a part of the landscape, as natural and forever as the sky.
I am reminded of the miners who dug the quartzite stones of Aravalli Hills that made the city of Delhi modern in the twentieth century—a modernity built on the relentless carving of the earth. In Mohammad Talib’s interviews with generations of quarry workers reverberated a voice: ‘Pattheron mein hamara janam hua, pattheron mein jeeten hain, isi ki roti khatey hain’ (We were born amidst stones, live in them, and get our bread from them). [2]
All that is solid melts into rubble.
When I board the metro rail that will take me home, I keep the towers of the waste plant in my line of sight; they rise as a wayward Gulliver above the roofs and terraces of countless neighbourhoods. I can follow them from the windows of the train as it races on pillars from Jasola Vihar until a few stations down to Sukhdev Vihar. The towers are unceasing in their labour—emitting a constant stream of grey smoke that is distinguishable until it dissolves into everything. The metro plunges underground, and I close my eyes.
II. Pyromania
bricks
cocunut shells
footwear
cloths
tarpaulin
large plastic
There are three landfills in the city of New Delhi. In 2016, one of them was on fire for a week. [3]
This was the year I realised that air is subdivided into particulate matter. Air, that thing not of sight, took the form of a muggy grey waft which hung oppressively in my room. I could grasp, for the first time, the appearance of matter that was coursing through my nasal passages and into my lungs with each breath. Refuse from the city, in all its material variance—wood, plastic, glass, cloth—was burning uncontrollably, and winds were dispersing these fumes beyond the radial limits of the dumping sites. This was no seasonal deposit into the body. Rather, it was a constant siege, the surge in its compositional toxicity revealed starkly and undeniably in moments of extremity.
Pollution was a public problem with teeth back then though as a policy issue it was kept at a distance from waste. Air quality index was published in newspapers, not tracked on the screens of phones or privately owned purifying devices. Photographs of the smog which slumbered over the city of Delhi were circulated on television screens. And the city continued to wade through it, blinking its way to work each hour of the day. I feel a punch in the gut when Tiffany Sia writes: ‘Crisis news is a genre film.’ [4] A freeze frame one can walk out of or scroll over, a mediatic carousel that numbs the intimacy of discharge.
We are lulled by the lure of ‘dirty pictures’, a term used by Susan Schuppli to describe the ‘image-making capacity’ of toxic landscapes. Schuppli is discussing the conjoined status of the image-event in the Anthropocene, such as an oil spill; where the photographic image is not merely representative or deterministic of its apprehension by the public, but that it holds the ability to transform the very field of human vision. In such image-events of the Anthropocene, there is a percussion of light, substance, and stratum which is the toxic ecology acting as a ‘fully realised aesthetic agent’. [5] In the example of air pollutants, a recurring feature in megacities of the ‘global south’ such as New Delhi, the materiality of the photochemical smog ‘alters the optical properties of the atmosphere such that the way we actually see is modified along with the thing itself.’ [6] Schuppli pays attention to two simultaneous processes: the transformation of sensory fields in human actors by toxic landscapes, and the extra-sensorial registers of change that matter bears. To be witness to the Anthropocene, to be alive in this arc is to ask: What are constitutional trajectories that wastes of varied kinds hold? What imprints are held in them?
The landfill that was on fire is located in a part of New Delhi known as Bhalswa. It reached its capacity in 2007, nearly a decade before the fire. Incidents of fire and collapsing of waste mounds has led to fatalities and destruction of informal colonies that dot the periphery of this landfill along with another at Ghazipur. Since it began in 1984, among the earliest landfills in the city, Bhalswa holds ‘legacy waste’—degrading refuse from times past. ‘Trommel’, a cylindrical sieve that rotates and separates larger sized objects from smaller ones, is used to sort legacy waste at these landfills. Yet as that wheel turns, fresh waste arrives every day—the cycle of wasted time cannot keep pace.
Carboniferous capitalism wants us to believe that waste becomes productive energy, what Bourriaud calls the ‘exform’. [7]
A thing depleted of its commodity function and stripped of use value is discarded before arriving at plants that transform them into heat. The incinerator-boiler is where solid waste transforms to slurry, then fly ash. The heat from this incineration fires the belly of the city, powering engines and factories, railroads and commercial complexes. But this is not the whole truth. That more waste arrives at dumpsites and treatment plants than their capacity or permissibility to process, ensures there is always an ample supply of detritus that is out of place, and out of time. The wheel of waste to energy can’t keep up with the velocity of consumption circuits. The more amalgamated representations of waste circulate, the more abstract each item in that group becomes, losing its potent particularity. The more we are asked to fixate on static piles and mounds, the less we can see their diffusive lifeworlds, their radical refusal to behave.
Legacy waste is unpredictable.
It is resistantly unique, it bears traces of lifestyles that have withered under the rapid pace of change. One method of dealing with legacy waste is called bio capping—which quite literally involves placing layers of soil and plants as a cover to level a waste site. Capping does not reduce contamination or toxicity, it merely conceals it with grass and repurposes dumpsites into parks, the land deemed unfit for permanent habitation.
Legacy waste is active, traversing new states of being.
It alters all neighbouring matter in ways such as subsidence—the caving of the dump which could bring down any structures built atop it; release of leachate, a contaminated liquid composition of degrading materials that could include heavy metals such as mercury, phenol, ammonia nitrogen compounds, all of which seep into groundwater; and the emanation of toxic gases. Waste sites are remnants of what McKenzie Wark describes as the ‘liquid world of industrial second nature’ under capitalism: ‘a built environment that no longer follows and forms the contours and topos of the land but rather transforms them into an abstract topographic plane.’ [8] A way to subvert these effects is biomining—the further extraction of resources such as plastic, rubber, textile, glass, from legacy waste; incinerating all that is combustible and, at least on the surface, closing the life cycle of waste. Yet biomining doesn’t reclaim everything. Since 2019, the ‘inert material’ that cannot be processed into soil through biomining at Bhalswa gets dumped at a site in Badarpur, a densely and continuously populated district of Delhi since the sixteenth century. The waste plant and the landfill are ever-expanding, sprouting in neighbourhoods around Delhi. I have to wonder whether a landfill or an incinerator are the greenhouses of extractive capitalism, sites that must constantly seek newer outposts, be guarded by sentries that protect the pyromantic alchemies of creative destruction?
I am reminded of Alexievich’s description of the Shelter Object at Chernobyl—a steel and concrete sarcophagus built to contain the radioactive emissions from reactor unit 4—as a corpse that still has breath, leaking radioactive isotopes from the gaps in its assembly. The Shelter Object is a blindfold writ large, imploring us to look away or bury beneath, all that appears dangerous.
In 2014, residents of Sukhdev Vihar woke up every morning to a snowfall of fly ash, which settled on their rooftops; a sediment generated from the Okhla waste plant. The epoch of waste does not remain inertly around us, but is vividly present within us, in gestures of perceptual shifts or habitual accretions. In the past year, as a pandemic confined us to the domestic, I took to gazing at the sky, generating a stream of pictures that captured cloud formations, wisps interrupted by an occasional sparrow or two. Each day, I label the pictures: Cirrus, Cumulus, Status and so on. In these pictures, the blue of the sky is tinged with a shade John Ruskin would have called sallow. I do not remember how my patch of sky looked before this.
III. Tender Alchemies
We are post-purity, we are mercury, arsenic, lead. How, and upon whom do we perform the litmus test of sanity?
In a survey of radioactive photography from Chernobyl, Kate Brown reports on the changed landscape following the eruption. ‘The lava eventually cooled to stalactites, black, sparkling, and impenetrable.’ These stalactites emit roentgens, radioactive matter, exposure to which could cause symptoms ranging from dizziness and nausea, to haemorrhage and death. Brown is examining the work of Sergei Koshelev and Aleksander Kupny, who have photographed the site of Chernobyl, entering the sarcophagus from two cavern-like points. Even as their bodies accumulate doses of radioactivity, their photographs hold flickers that Brown describes as ‘self-portraits’ by decaying isotopes—artificial matter created in laboratories, ‘strontium, cesium, plutonium, uranium.’ ‘These points of light are not representations. They are energy embodied.’ [9]
To consider these speckles on photographic film, the waxen tint of the sky above my home, the tarred filters being pulled out of purifiers every winter, the accrual of contact with waste forms through air, water, land is to think in the realm of traces. Describing the paradigm of witnessing as an impure means of living in the world, Schuppli states that: ‘In forensic science, every contact is perceived as leaving a trace, in forensic imagination every encounter is capable of being retraced.’ [10]
This is a critical reorientation in thinking about waste sites, which have so far been framed in the myths of the Plantation as a distant, contained sphere of action. Yet, as Wendy Wolford reminds us: ‘Plantation boundaries were and are porous. They are literally teeming with life, some of which will be captured as labor but all of which resist complete control by external compulsion (even when internalised).’ [11]
The Okhla waste plant is managed by a private infrastructural wing of the O P Jindal Group, an industrial conglomerate valued at USD 18 billion. Under the project titled ‘Ecopolis’, the Jindal group operates or is in the process of setting up over 8 plants across India. [12] On the Ecopolis website, you can bask in the afterglow of a green future—promises of clean energy, pictures of orderly waste plants with trimmed gardens, and commitments to public welfare. In January 2021, the National Green Tribunal passed an order following reportage of leachates from waste plants and landfills contaminating groundwater in parts of Delhi, including the river Yamuna. Water drawn from handpumps, which are widely in use across settlements and colonies of the city, contain higher than safe levels of phenol, lead, chlorine, nickel, sulphate, Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD). [13] At home, I turn a purifier on every morning to fill up bottles with drinking water, the seamless movement of muscle memory. When M Jaqui Alexander asked, ‘What do lives of privilege look like in the midst of war and the inevitable violence that accompanies the building of empire?’ I think of this moment that starts my day. [14]
The promise of this compound word, ecopolis—an ‘ecologically forward city-state’, a mode of governance where ecology precedes and defines the city—is exactly the kind of empty speak that capital can give us in times of rapid ecocide. Repeatedly, journalistic reports and judicial orders restate the negligence and lack of compliance with measures to guarantee biospheric wellness and public safety at the waste plants. Calls to composting are raised, then swept away. Composting, ‘a material labour whereby old scraps are transformed—through practices of care and attention—into nutrient-rich new soil’, goes against the lens of the state which denies what Latour calls ‘naturecultures’—human life as encumbered, engendered and inextricable from environments.[15] In the sightlines of the state, ‘land’ is a resource when it can be exclusionary, when its occupation or use can be demarcated into legitimate and illegitimate with ‘the inscribing of boundaries through devices such as fences, title deeds, laws, zones, regulations, landmarks and story-lines.’ [16] This is the voice that rings through tribunals and waste management regulations—informal colonies and slums generate desegregated waste and the wasteful use of land. To become green, the city must rationalise who has a right to occupy it. I remember the echoes of quarry workers in Talib’s interviews, the imbrication of their psyche with the rocks, the emotive entanglements they built with stone-work and remind myself:
This is not the only voice.
It is a night in October and I walk through a park somewhere in New Delhi. The battered vein of the concrete walkway that runs through the grass is covered in a moss so green that it feels hallucinatory. That night, as I leave the park, I see the moss on the walls that support a rusted gate, used for entry and exit. Moonlight drapes the walls with a green blanket and I breathe in—smoke, spores, slit, the song of the cicadas, the glimmer of deep time.
Later, I requested a friend to click a picture of the moss in daylight. Rays of light are embedded with ancestral time, travelling from days past and with the power to illuminate the boundlessness of life against linearity. When I scroll through these images, the verdant ground is alive. In inquiries that shift modes of being from ‘bodies of knowledge’ to ‘environments of knowledge’, scholars Donna Haraway and Jennifer Gabrys ‘demonstrate how the embodied and situated encounters we have with visual technologies can provide an entry point for generating other knowledge practices.’ Haraway’s work discusses the Crittercam and Gabrys focuses on Moss Cam—projects that follow the passage of time in non-human biotic and abiotic forms by securing video cameras with motion sensors in marine and greenwood sites. Similar to these projects is the Spillcam, which was a live feed of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill leak site; and in a simpler sense, the webcams which relay corpse flower blooms from botanical centers around the world. In the case of the Moss Cam, the sensors extend the function of the camera to that of an imager, connecting each frame to a dataset of images. This approach considers an image as not a fixed moment in time but a dynamic, processual ‘moment articulated within a larger set of relationships.’ As visual tracking projects generate reams of webcam images and communities of active citizen-scientists who view these, they also ‘produce the possibilities for inhabitations, where mutual embodiment is a process of making worlds’.[17] To the Moss Cam enthusiasts even the disparate pictures from a park in New Delhi could narrate stories of shifts in moisture content in the air, changes in temperature, and the muted embodiment of macro decisions of policy and governance in intimate realities.
I think of the waste plants and how habitats near and far are recording their journey past the projected life cycle of incinerator units into marcescent afterlives. I was warned about the smell: the heady mix of smoke, fly ash and chemicals that floats in the air around Okhla. I remember feeling indifferent to it, inhaling as I had on my way to the plant an assortment of twenty-first century scents: exhaust fumes, vehicular emissions, dust, sanitiser aerosols, the sweetness of winter blooms that lit up hedges in traffic roundabouts. To live in this hour is an exercise in parataxis, sifting through mutinous residues that arrive but refuse to settle; asking repeatedly: yes and?
I look in the shower drain where soil which had stuck to my soles is circling in municipal water.
I note this down as a talisman:
All bodies that exit the rehearsal are depositories.
Notes
[1] Svetlana Alexeivich, Chernobyl Prayer (London: Penguin Books, 2016), 51.
[2] Mohammad Talib, ‘Thinking Through the Stones’ in Writing Labour: Stone Quarry Workers in Delhi (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2012), 37.
[3] Staff Report, ‘Photos: Burning mounds of garbage at Delhi’s Bhalswa landfill exacerbate air pollution crisis in NCR’, Scroll, October 30, 2018, https://scroll.in/article/900227/photos-burning-mounds-of-garbage-at-delhis-bhalswa-landfill-exacerbate-air-pollution-crisis-in-ncr
[4] Tiffany Sia, Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕: The Leak as Discharge (Inpatient Press, 2019), excerpt accessed on Berwick Film & Media Art Festival 2021, https://bfmaf.org/essay/too-salty-too-wet-%E6%9B%B4%E5%92%B8%E6%9B%B4%E6%BF%95-the-leak-as-discharge/
[5] Susan Schuppli, ‘Dirty Pictures’ in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014-2016, eds. Mirna Belina and Arie Altena (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts, 2016). Schuppli builds on Irmgard Emmelhainz’s assertion that the image-centrism of the Anthropocene produces a ‘crisis of visuality, which causes a lack of imagination or even blindness.’ Irmgard Emmelhainz, ‘Conditions of Visuality Under the Anthropocene and Images of the Anthropocene to Come’, E-Flux, vol. 63, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/63/60882/conditions-of-visuality-under-the-anthropocene-and-images-of-the-anthropocene-to-come/
[6] Susan Schuppli, ‘Dirty Pictures’, 204.
[7] Nicolas Bourriaud, The Exform, trans. Erik Butler (London: Verso, 2016).
[8] McKenzie Wark, ‘The Vectoralist Class’, E-Flux, vol. 65, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336347/the-vectoralist-class/
[9] Kate Brown, ‘Marie Curie’s Fingerprint: Nuclear Spelunking in the Chernobyl Zone’ in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, eds. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 41.
[10] Susan Schuppli, Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2020), 9.
[11] Wendy Wolford, ‘The Plantationocene: A Lusotropical Contribution to the Theory’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, vol. 111, 2021, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24694452.2020.1850231
[12] Ecopolis Website, JITF Urban Infrastructure Limited, http://www.jindalecopolis.com/
[13] National Green Tribunal Hearing on Original Application No. 519/2019, January 29, 2021, India Environment Portal, http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/file/dumpsites-Delhi-NGT-order.pdf
[14] M Jaqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 16.
[15] Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities, vol. 10 (2), 2018, https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/10/2/501/136691/Composting-Feminisms-and-Environmental-Humanities
[16] Tania Murray Li, ‘What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment’, Plenary Lecture, Royal Geographic Society, July 14, 2014, https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/tran.12065
[17] Jennifer Gabrys, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-geographies of Experience’ in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 63 - 64.
Arushi Vats writes on arts and culture. Her writing has been published on online platforms such as MARCH: a journal of art & strategy, Alternative South Asia Photography, The Karachi Collective, LSE International History, Critical Collective. She has authored curatorial notes for Galerie Mirchandani Steinruecke, Mumbai; Reliable Copy, Bangalore; and Aicon Contemporary, New York. Her short stories are published in The Gulmohar Quarterly, nether quarterly and Hakara Journal; poetry is forthcoming in PIX Quarterly. She contributed a curatorial essay for a volume on the exhibition The Constitution of India at 70: Celebrate, Illuminate, Rejuvenate, Defend, published by Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust in 2021.
She is the recipient of the Eyebeam Momus Critical Writing Fellowship 2021 – 2022. She lives in New Delhi, India. Her writing can be found at: https://www.arushivats.com/
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.