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For this photo, I'm taking a more general approach and ditching the questions. The image hardly seems to do anything that the second image does not already do. I'd be curious to see any visual evidence of this rate of mercury dumping which so thoroughly surpassing what occurred at Minamata. Do you have any photographs of people downstream suffering health effects of this region's ecologically devasting mining practice? Conversely, your discussion of the market for gold makes me curious to see the gold in use.

The image communicates the authority and persuasive rhetoric of corporate sponsored remediation science: "cinnabar" circulates in the contemporary U.S. (or for my age group, at least) as the name of an Estee Lauder perfume (associated in orientalist fashion with lacquerware), not as a toxic ore from which mercury was extracted.

Batrec Pamphlet

There was no design statement that I could view, but I would guess that the image is ethnographic in "studying up" re corporate discourses of disaster/toxicant remediation.  The assumption is that only liquid mercury is hazardous and that changing the form will remediate/buffer the toxicity; but the remediation is mostly discursive (i.e., b/c there's less awareness of cinnabar's toxicity in the present moment).  

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my eye moves from top to bottom, seemingly viewing the "stabilization of mercury" through the images 

I find the image aesthetically pleasing. It's composition is simple and clear. It presents mercury as a transformative, and powerful substance. 

This image seems to convey that mercury no longer needs to be seen as a toxic element to those subjects who engage with it. Rather than becoming the victims of potential toxicity, Bartec's technology promises a mastery, and thereby detoxification of this element. 

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.

I'm going to take ethnography pretty literally for a moment and reflect on the use of the words "Swiss quality" in promotional material. My research has led me to trouble the notion that quality ever means anything outside the context of identity politics. That goes for German aesthetic theory (Wagner) as much as for New Age spiritualism (Pirsig). Anyway, the idea that the Swiss somehow guarantee the worthiness of a project by virtue of labeling themselves its providers evokes a number of Western imperialist traditions.