The visualization highlights that the toxicities can be produced and legitimized under certain socio-political and economic conditions by capitalists. Moreover, it shows how the vulnerable communities are further pushed to margines and makes toxcities an inherent part of their lives.
As someone who also is always drawn to taking photographs of signage, like you I immediately paused for the striking juxtaposition in this mural of “food security” and “pest control.” This visualization is rich because it captures a purposeful message being communicated through a mural that seems so prominently and publicly displayed that it is hard for you or even your interlocutors to ignore.
I’m curious about what the contents of the pesticides themselves are, what you research could say about the figure applying the pesticide—is this a job that exposes the body to chemicals in a harmful way? Is this a job usually done by a specialist or simply by farmers themselves?
This image is the result of the ethnographer photographing an existing visualization in the form of a public mural
The caption hints that there are other scenes portrayed on the rest of the wall which would be interesting to see analyzed. And its ethnographic import might be enriched by a small biographical sketch, if any information is available, of the artist(s) responsible for this work.
This visualization is ethnographically rich because you take a work of art that seems to be more or less a piece of political quasi-propaganda for the president's economic and agricultural goals for the country, but your framing helps us see it as a visualization not simply of progress or aspiration but a much more complicated relationship between toxics and social reproduction.
The caption informed my understanding of the image by opening (leading me to) a critical space for interogating the concepts of landscape, native, productive and their antitheses: anti-landscape, non-native (no, hybrid, compromised, contaminated?), un-productive. What struck me most was the transformation of this image into a monstrous, living (breathing), promixal place.
The caption is excellent and I learned a great deal about the image from reading it. Its focus is on anti-landscape, an idea new to me. What grabbed my attention in reading was sense of the site as a living place. I find that provocation gripping and I would suggest further elaboration and interrogation of this idea, especially in the context of a life cycle or timescape (human time, toxic time) in future work.
The image is a black and white photograph that appears to have been taken during winter. I don't know the source of the photograph. It is strangely beautiful. I read the pipes and tubes as part of a larger circulatory system. It's desolate nature (grey tone, winter, the absence of vineyards, or surrounding farmlands) and the signage ("non-native") lends the image a of sense of science fiction.
The analytic question seems to suggest that one image might be able to capture the ethnographic import of the anti-landscape being interrogated. I find the image stark, and it is this starkness that opens a space for multiple ethnographic provocations.If possible, I would love to see an aerial view of this site with a similar visual aesthetic.
