SoiferI VtP Collaboration Biography

My initial interest in the project sprang from both my multimodal course with Roxanne Varzi and participation in the Anthropocene field camp in New Orleans. Visiting New Orleans enabled me to open my mind to multiple possibilities for thinking through my problem space, particularly the connection made between the plantation and power plant as mutually informing, racialized, heavily place-based toxic modes of production and exploitation. Specifically, this work informed my engagement with materials collected in both Houston and New York City during the Ethnographic Methods course last quarter. The section of our sketchbook regarding late industrialism was a particularly useful analytic, and I’m curious to see how it might inform my future work. I am interested in utilizing the visual as both a method of representing “data” and as a methodological tool for comprehending my field site, and I find that white supremacist notions of both knowledge and safety (and how they intertwine via the knowledge economy) pervade as the toxins that perpetuate gentrification in U.S. cities. I seek to participate in this project to both pursue this line of thought as well as to learn from my peers how they conceive of toxicity and manners of visualizing it. I would additionally be very interested in the possibilities of a collaborative representation of toxicity with one of my peers for our installation in the spring.