When Velu asked me where I was from, I told him I grew up in the south of Chennai. He smiled, looking away, sinking into one of his momentary reveries. “It is the same city… the same coast… yet it is so different… you know.” While I think I did know, Velu often reminded me that I would never fully understand or fully know his place. When I sat with him, watching him mend his fishing nets, stitching the frayed ends that were the result of prawns, fish and crabs trying to escape his nets, he pointed to the coal fired power plants that towered over us across the river and told me that there was nothing left for him here. “This place”, he insisted, “was over”. This place in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, India, is familiar yet elusive. While I lived in the same city as Velu, forty-five kilometers south of the neighbourhood he called home, I breathed in a different coastal air. I heard the sounds of the sea and sniffed the salt in the air. Velu told me he did too. But he also smelt the coal dust in the air, felt it in the water and saw it on his nets. He pointed to lesions on his body and insisted I examine the discolouration of his fishing gear. He told me he was “used to it now.” The toxicity Velu has become “used to” exhibits itself in myriad forms. It is experienced and comprehended through the body, a body that is intimately linked to place. I examine this equation, of place and the body, and explore through my photographs how toxicity blurs this distinction: making the body the place where toxicity is made visible and place as the body’s experiences of toxicity.
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