Peter Chesney: It's Elemental

Projects like this do the necessary work of explaining how toxicity takes literal form and has undeniable physiological effects. That said, you would not always know it from promotional material. Batrec's approach to advertising solutions for this toxicity problem aestheticizes the mercury such that polluters can comfortably and innocently hire this service. The whole dynamic reminds me of Derrida's critique of forgiveness/reparations discourse, that it mostly facilitates states and actors in their search for "forgive and forget." The juxtaposition of an environmental services company and your words describing Minamata is jarring. I'd expect to see those other characteristic images from Greenpeace or whoever featuring cats gone crazy and wasted away Japanese peasants. Instead, mercury itself looks like just as beautiful an element as gold.