The Fouling
Shoghig Halajian
IDEA KASA in Cefalu, Sicily. Photo: Ohan Breiding
Fouling (noun): the accumulation of unwanted material on solid surfaces.
Fouling (verb): make foul or dirty; pollute.
Foul (adj.): offensive to the senses, especially through having a disgusting smell or taste or being unpleasantly soiled.1
John’s Museum
Buoy balls look like teddy bear heads. They are plump, perfectly round, and have two rings at the top like disproportionally small ears. They are used to string fishing nets, designate certain locations on open water, and mark the position of submerged objects. Often you can find stranded ones near the site of shipwrecks or large container spills. John tells me that in the past the buoys were all made of glass but, now that plastic is ubiquitous, the glass ones are worth quite a bit of money, in the high hundreds. He even has some in his collection that are worth thousands, which he refuses to sell.
I walk through the aisles of his museum. The building must have originally been a barn or a large garage for tractors. Now it is packed with mounted shelves, rows of banquet tables, and various storage crates of all sizes. Hanging from the ceiling are fishing nets, scuba wetsuits, model airplanes, groupings of aluminum containers, styrofoam floats, a makeshift chandelier made of plastic spoons, a sequence of wooden birdhouses, and a plethora of plastic buoys that range in scale from the size of a bowling ball to a washing machine.
I pick up a small one to gauge its weight and notice the layer of residue on its surface. It is crusty, covered with dirt-webbing and speckles of hardened algae. Another buoy has fully formed purple barnacles attached to it, clustered growths that look like hollowed-out hills slanted with personality. They have sharp edges and appear more fragile than they actually are.
John established his museum in 2015. All of the objects in his collection came from the ocean, washing up on the shores of northern Washington where he has been combing the beaches a couple of times a week for the last five decades. These toys, kitchenware, water bottles, sneakers, and frisbees all offer partial stories of how we live out our daily lives through the things that fill up our world. Each object drifted on the surface of water for years, tossed by waves, swallowed up by unsuspecting marine creatures, snarled in trash piles and released, before finally making it to shore.
John has gathered the small disposable bits in the center aisle: hundreds of toothbrushes spilling out of a Tupperware container, combs stacked in a box, a jar filled with empty shotgun shells, a tangled-up knot of fish-shaped baits. The longevity of these objects is visible through their forms. I walk around this table, grazing them with my hand. The bristles of the brushes are worn out and discolored; the combs have dirt in their crevices. These things must have touched so many surfaces and so many bodies, used daily then tossed out. I am slightly repulsed by the thought that the material traces of each object’s intimate history is now on my hands. So many of these objects are older than me, just like their former owners. I can sense a glimmer of the lives they shared with their humans, and I can clearly see how their journeys through the Pacific gyres marked them, how the saltwater tainted their surfaces. These things rode the ocean currents through human and nonhuman worlds, and are now here on display, suspended in some sort of afterlife.
We will spend the next two days studying and documenting these objects. John and his wife Debbie have generously invited us to spend the night in their house next door, preparing two bedrooms for us. I got to pick first so I chose the beach-themed one. My partner and collaborator Ohan’s is hunting-themed, adorned with camouflage prints and taxidermy animals.
Selection of buoys from John Anderson’s collection. Documented on Rialto beach in Forks, Washington. Photos: Ohan Breiding
Marine Life
This summer, I lived in Venice, Italy, where Ohan and I went to research the politics of the ocean, listening to discussions on water pollution, environmental extraction, and migration, while reflecting on ways to listen to and learn from oceanic worlds and ocean-based knowledges. Both within and outside of the research, conversations regularly leaned into the MOSE system: a series of mobile floodgates installed in 2020 that are located at three different inlets into the Venetian Lagoon. The floodgate walls are located just under the surface of the water and appear, rising up, only when the tide becomes a threat, usually during the new and full moons.
While I never saw the MOSE in action—and you cannot see it out of action—I did start to notice other marks produced by the uneasy cohabitation of humans and the ocean. The owner of a vintage clothing store showed me a thin brown line on the wall that wraps around her store, evidencing how high the water reached in the 2019 flood. During the low tides, I observed that every object that came in contact with the water—the bottom of docks, submerged ropes, the lower half of wooden logs—was blanketed in a greenish-brown gooey substance consisting of barnacles, sponges, mussels, and algae that quickly proliferates under water. These marine species cling to human-made surfaces, changing their appearance and texture. This sheath looks icky to touch, but I suspect it would feel quite pleasurable to go ahead and do so.
Although “fouling” (or “biofouling”) species do many things, like filter particulates and improve water clarity, provide habitat, and offer an important source of food for many species including humans, they are deemed unwelcome in human-made infrastructures: invaders that reduce efficiency and increase the costs of production, maintenance, and oceanic transport. They cause corrosion, the deterioration of wood and metallic parts, material failure, and expensive repairs—all part of the hard-to-control effects of what theorist Anne Tsing calls “feral” growth.2 This growth marks the seam between non-human life and the built environment that humans construct and impose upon it.
Ducks eating marine “biofouling” species that are growing on the bottom of Venetian boats. Video: Cécile Hummel
Beginning March 11, 2011, two disasters unfolded in the Pacific Ocean. A magnitude 9 earthquake hit Japan followed by an approximately 130 foot tsunami, leading to nearly 20,000 deaths, as well as injuries, displacements, and the toppling of infrastructure across the Tohoku and Kanto regions. They also triggered the total blackout of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which caused the meltdown of its nuclear cores, a hydrogen explosion, and radioactive fallout.
In Radiation and Revolution, critic and activist Sabu Kohso unpacks how labeling the Fukushima nuclear disaster as a singular event implies that it was discontinuous from the systems of capitalist overdevelopment that continue to produce the conditions for future disasters. It also implies that the catastrophe ended. “The disaster is not over,” Kohso writes, “It continues in the repercussions of the event, like quakes spreading multidimensionally from an epicenter or devastations multiplying themselves from ground zero.”3
Being from California, I know earthquakes. They are endemic to the region. Twice a week, while commuting between Los Angeles and San Diego for school, I pass the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, also known as SONGS. Last year, during COVID lockdowns, the secluded beach just south of the facility’s monumental domes became a favored gathering spot for me and my Queer Surf Meetup friends. Hidden from the highway and shielded by jagged sandstone mountains, it felt otherworldly, like the safest place to be during the early days of the pandemic: away from crowds, immersed in water, and surrounded by a queer community of ocean lovers who were determined to claim space in a sport that is heavily white-hetero-male dominated. Safety can of course be a biased presumption—the existence of a nuclear power plant in an earthquake-prone region makes the risk of a similar catastrophic event quite great in California. But I did not feel this danger whenever I passed by or visited for the day. It is very easy to ignore the realities that reside under the surface, to block and push them out toward another’s purview of responsibility. We are taught to equate the imperceptible with the nonexistent.
As the construction of new nuclear plants are presently underway, there has been a peculiar discussion about how to keep humans away from nuclear waste sites that will still be toxic thousands of years into the future. Linguists posit that people cannot read texts that are more than a thousand years old. So as humans continue to generate nuclear waste, what kinds of signage do we need to convey that a site is detrimental to life long into the future? In 1981, the US Department of Energy gathered scientists and linguists to establish the Human Interference Task Force, charged with figuring out how to protect future humans from Yucca Mountain's radioactive repository, which was planned to be a nuclear waste site disguised as a mountain in the Nevada desert. While the lack of funding for this project led to its cancellation, writer Paolo Fabbri and semiotician Françoise Bastide, who were part of the panel, came up with a proposal: a cat that would turn green when it approached radioactive material.4 Scientists would genetically engineer a breed of cat to change color in response to radiation through enzyme interaction, a mechanism used to study cellular activity.5 By then circulating this image of a green cat as a warning sign of impending doom in our folktales and popular culture, the “ray cat solution” would trigger a fear-and-flight response in humans.6 While neither the Yucca Mountain nor the green cat projects came to be, nuclear plants continue to get built, despite the lingering question of what to do with the afterlife of their waste.
IDEA KASA in Cefalu, Sicily. Video: Ohan Breiding and Shoghig Halajian
During our travels throughout Italy, one day on our way back from a beach we encounter a green cat. We sense that this cat has been following us for quite some time; now it appears on the outer wall of a building. Overhead, a large marquee spells out the store’s name, IDEA KASA, which remains forever ingrained in my mind. We go inside, discovering a warehouse that is full (like really overflowing) with random knick-knacks, plastic toys, swimming gear, slippers, hats—as if everything unnecessary, every impulse purchase, was packed into one place. And this green cat, an inflated pool toy, gazes out at the busy street, deadpan, its greenish color a result of prolonged exposure to the sun. It’s likely been on display for many months, years? We can’t tell. But we both feel that it signaled to us, drew us into this empty parking lot. We are being watched by it, so we comply. We buy it, deflate it, and take it home with us. We designate it as the ghost of a future species following us around, sending us a message we have yet to decipher.
The word “tsunami” in Japanese (津波) translates directly as “wave in the harbor.” The crashing sweep of the great waves on the harbors and coasts of the Honshu region in 2011 led to the massive dispersal of objects in the Pacific Ocean. Countless items, from toys to motorcycles, docks to large fishing vessels, were cast into the ocean. They drifted on open waters for years until reaching the coasts of Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Canada. The waves also displaced nearly 300 species of marine organisms, which rafted thousands of miles on these objects, reproducing multiple generations en route. They continue to wash up today. Marine ecologist James T. Carlton, who we met last year, explained that these particular post-tsunami species have traveled farther than any other marine life. This phenomenon was made possible by plastic. While natural materials like wood decompose after long exposure to sun and water, plastic remains intact far beyond the decade-long journey from Japan to the West Coast of the US. Once these marine species arrive at the shore, they are deemed non-native, invasive, and a threat to local ecosystems. The dualism of native/non-native is a densely complex one given the broader context of the global circulation of goods, people, and viruses around the world, and the systematic need to control the migratory behavior of certain species over others. As a result, those species manifest a form of unwanted excess—an abject buildup at the threshold of visuality.
Japanese barnacle Megabalanus Rosa, documented through a microscope. This barnacle traveled over 10 years on a plastic buoy from the Tohoku coast in Honshu, Japan to the coast of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Video: Ohan Breiding and Shoghig Halajian
The periodic arrival of dispersed ocean objects, and the lives that inhabit their surfaces, gives form to the continuousness of the March 11 disaster. These arrivals move well past the singularity of the cataclysmic event, toward its ongoing processes: the mediation and utilization of the “disaster” for consumerist, developmental, and nationalist ends; the slow spread of radionuclide pollution in the environment; its impact on agriculture and daily sustenance; as well as its psychic residue in personal memory and practices of grief, survival, and resistance.
John says he doesn’t think these objects carry harmful amounts of radiation. The minor amounts of deposition have likely decayed or been washed away by months of pounding by ocean waves. He believes that our bodies contain more radiation than these objects, from eating fish, getting X-rays, and otherwise just living and being in this world. We are the products of nuclear weapons testing, after all, and there’s a lot more toxicity in the ocean than there is radiation held by these objects. John seems protective of his artifacts. I can tell from the tone of his voice. He knows exactly where each item goes. There is a real logic to the contained chaos of his museum. I follow his lead, and handle each object with care and caution.
Plastic
Ohan and I have been researching the entangling of plastic with our most basic systems of existence. Plastic is essential to most modern forms of sustenance and care, from food packaging to cosmetics to prosthetics—the list grows endless. Plastic is liquidity, modernity, rapidity; functionality wrapped up in a tangible thing. We hear that plasticity is life, that its chief characteristic, adaptability, is the same trait that allows humans to function and survive. This belief runs deep across current conceptions of productivity, value, and even empathy. We are asked to adapt to the most harmful of conditions.
Plastic began to enter North American households in the second half of the twentieth century, linked through marketing to modern ways of life in tandem with the emergence of new societal values. From a manufacturer’s perspective, the benefit of plastic is its ability to save time. Unlike natural materials (wood, metals, sand, rock), which come with a form and shape and must ultimately be extracted then sculpted to be of use-value, plastic is produced through the process of polymerization, through which synthetic materials are heated and shaped at the same time. Therefore matter and form are generated in one single gesture, leading to an incredibly time- and money-efficient manufacturing process.7
In the 1930s, DuPont Manufacturing Company were denounced as "merchants of death,”8 accused of encouraging the US to enter the First World War in order to create a military market for its products. Plastic was produced on a massive scale during the Second World War, its use including as synthetic rubber for tires and to insulate the RAF radar that would detect enemy attacks.9 DuPont also played a major role in the Manhattan Project, the research and development program that would produce the first atomic weapons—including the two detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. To shift this narrative and conceal their complicity, DuPont used advertising to brand their products as “miracles.” In the era of mass consumerism that followed the war, polyethylene became critical to the production of daily-use products, from Tupperware to squeeze bottles to hula-hoops, all of which were lighter, more flexible, and more disposable. A special 50-page insert of the 1947 issue of House Beautiful promoted: “Plastics… A Way to a Better More Carefree Life.”
Plastic obeys our needs. What was originally considered a cheap substitute, a replica of more refined natural materials like glass and wood, came to fulfill, even define, a core value of multi-functionality. The fungibility and “protean adaptability”10 of the material was sought after by manufacturers, and then heavily promoted in marketing campaigns that aligned adaptability with accessibility. The tension between permanence and impermanence lies at the heart of plastic. For mass consumption to work, consumers must continuously disregard any inkling of an object’s afterlife. The commodity’s lifeline is supposed to be finite: it fulfills its purpose for a desired and designated amount of time and then must disappear. This idea of objects as existing only while they are in use has ultimately shaped our conception of time.
Anne Carson writes that “How people tell time is an intimate and local fact about them.”11 The tick of the long hand approaching the short; the rumbling motor of a car tolerating rush hour; happy hour, after hours, the morning hour; the morning light, then bright noon when there is no warmth to the light—these incremental progressions organize and spatialize time for us. Plastic is one of the most intimate materials, caressing all aspects of our domestic, sexual, (re)productive, and public lives. But it also complicates the notion of locality, as its reach is both local and global, its scale potentially microscopic and macro. It is everywhere.12 And in being so, it must move to the beat of capitalism’s rhythm, both instantly and eternally.
Plastic also extends into the past. Its production entails reaching into the earth, unsettling varying geological strata, and extracting the material worlds—ongoing worlds—of past life. In her discussion of the Plastic Age, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent describes: “plastic is the upper layer of many layers of the past that have resulted in crude oil stored in the depths of the soil and the sea…”13 Yet plastic erases its own history, just as the commodity erases the social relations that are imbued within it. Plastic appears to be unbound to the materials of this world, and this is what it promises: a feeling of unboundedness, a better, more carefree life.
The objects in the back left corner of the museum get less colorful, display less branding. Stacks of plates, cups, pots and pans, Teflon non-stick surfaces, lightweight kitchen appliances, the stuff I grew up with but rarely paid any attention to because they were simply unremarkable, a discounted landscape of feminized labor. My gaze falls on a tiny spider that is moving across the face of one of the wider skillets. It feels hypnotic in the midst of all this visual and sensorial stimulation. There is a distinct smell in here. In the background, I hear John’s voice narrating the astounding stories behind the objects he periodically picks out and hands to us.
Mineko
Ohan’s family member Mineko survived the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Her husband did not. Much of Mineko’s family lives in Japan and were affected by the 2011 nuclear disaster, receiving small doses of the radionuclides that the reactors continue to emit. Mineko’s name means three cats in Japanese, her mother’s means four cats. For our project, she has been sending us recorded memories of her experiences before and after the tsunami. In one recording, she recalls the hazy experience of regaining her consciousness while floating in water, no land in sight, and noticing a small cat sitting on a wooden raft staring back at her. It was just calmly floating there nearby on the surface of water. She says they locked eyes and this is when she knew that she was still alive. It was the feeling of being recognized by another living being.
Mineko can’t remember the color of the cat, but in a later conversation she tells us it was maybe gray, then another time it was white. She now lives in Switzerland, a landlocked country, just down the street from the house where the physicist Erwin Schrödinger lived. Schrödinger came up with the famous thought experiment asking whether a cat placed in a sealed box with an explosive radioactive atom is alive or dead. This hypothetical scenario is meant to illustrate how quantum physics works, but it never asks the question: what color is the cat? Mineko is careful with her words when we discuss her experience of loss and grief after the tsunami. She has written extensively about it in her daily journals, all in Japanese because she is more comfortable writing in her native language, but also, she says, to be sure that no one in her immediate circle can read it. Now, she is slowly sharing memories with us on her own terms, at her own pace.
The post-tsunami plastic debris arrived on beaches covered in the grime of “fouling” ecosystems. Their belatedness is critical. As these objects drifted for years, life grew on them. As they drifted, we waited. Their overdue arrivals offer an alternative temporal framework to the persistent rhythm of production and consumption. These objects ask us to hone in on a different register, to observe rather than consume, to acknowledge lifespans of varying lengths despite the difficulty of doing so, and to tend to worlds that are and are not our own.
We leave John and Debbie, heading home. Somewhere between Forks and Seattle, we stop at a hybrid hardware and crafts store. Ohan goes inside as I wait in the car. My mind is overloaded with stories, one after another. I am grateful but also exhausted. Ohan returns within a few short minutes, gets in and extends their right hand out to me. They are eager to show me something, holding back their words. Their hand is formed into a fist, so I gently pull open their fingers and discover a small, green glow-in-the-dark cat sitting on their palm. I gasp in excitement and quickly snatch it from them. “It is here again, what does that mean?” This time it’s in miniature, only about an inch tall. I hold the cat up to my face, aligning it with the horizon of the road ahead. It has thin ridges on its surface to connote fur, and a fat tail perked up at the tip. It’s a lioness even though I think it’s supposed to be a common house cat. I wonder if it actually glows in the dark. I hold my hands together around the cat to shut out any light, then peek inside between my thumbs. There’s still too much sunlight. Ohan starts the engine, so I reach for my seatbelt. I open up the glove compartment and place the cat inside for safe keeping. I pop up the door and hear the latch click as it shuts closed.
Dinosaur oil meme (www.memecrunch.com). Shared by Kate Hall
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Thank you to Nina Hoechtl and Lee Relvas for the feedback, and to Ohan Breiding for the ongoing collaboration. This text collects memories, stories and lessons that were shared during the summer research residency at Ocean Space / TBA-21 Academy in Venice, Italy.
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Shoghig Halajian is a curator, co-director of the nonprofit arts space Human Resources LA, and co-editor of the online journal Georgia, which is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a Critical Gender Studies specialization at the University of California, San Diego, where her research explores contemporary queer aesthetics and performance through a critical race lens, focusing on artistic experiments with collaboration. She was a 2021 research fellow at Ocean Space / TBA21-Academy in Venice, Italy, in collaboration with artist Ohan Breiding.
1 Select definitions from “Fouling” in Oxford Languages (Oxford University Press, 2021), accessed December 23, 2021. The terms “(bio)fouling” and “invasive” for arrivant species are implicated in histories of eugenics through the work of Charles S. Elton, who is known as the father of invasive ecology. These words connote negative value-judgements about managing species based on geographic origin. This aspect of my research will be developed in a later paper.
2 See Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene: www.feralatlas.org.
3 Sabu Kohso, Radiation and Revolution (London: Duke University Press, 2020), 17.
4 Thank you to Ohan Breiding for bringing this project to my attention.
5 Scientists have employed a similar strategy for AIDS research by inserting a gene into cats that produces a fluorescent protein called GFP, which is produced naturally in jellyfish and used to monitor the activity of altered genes. The artist Lynn Hershman Leeson famously explores this case in her project, Glowing Cat from The Infinity Engine (2013-15).
6 See The Ray Cat Solution: www.theraycatsolution.com.
7 Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “Plastics, materials and dreams of dematerialization,” in Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic, edited by Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins and Mike Michael (London: Routledge, 2013).
8 The term “merchants of death” was popular in antiwar circles, and was used extensively during the Senate hearings in 1936, which examined how much influence the manufacturers of armaments had in the US government’s decision to enter the First World War.
9 Allison Cobb, Plastic: An Autobiography (New York: Nightboat Books, 2021).
10 Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, "Reconfiguring Nature Through Syntheses: From Plastics to Biomimetics,” in B. Bensaude-Vincent, W.R. Newman, The Natural and the Artificial. An Ever-Evolving Polarity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 3.
11 Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 3.
12 “At the present moment, nowhere on earth can be considered free of plastic.” From Heather Davis, “Life and Death in the Anthropocene: A Short History of Plastic,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 350.
13 Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “Plastics, materials and dreams of dematerialization,” in Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic, edited by Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins, and Mike Michael (New York: Routledge, 2013), 24.
February 14, 2022
BACK TO TOP
The Fouling
Shoghig Halajian
IDEA KASA in Cefalu, Sicily. Photo: Ohan Breiding
Fouling (noun): the accumulation of unwanted material on solid surfaces.
Fouling (verb): make foul or dirty; pollute.
Foul (adj.): offensive to the senses, especially through having a disgusting smell or taste or being unpleasantly soiled.1
John’s Museum
Buoy balls look like teddy bear heads. They are plump, perfectly round, and have two rings at the top like disproportionally small ears. They are used to string fishing nets, designate certain locations on open water, and mark the position of submerged objects. Often you can find stranded ones near the site of shipwrecks or large container spills. John tells me that in the past the buoys were all made of glass but, now that plastic is ubiquitous, the glass ones are worth quite a bit of money, in the high hundreds. He even has some in his collection that are worth thousands, which he refuses to sell.
I walk through the aisles of his museum. The building must have originally been a barn or a large garage for tractors. Now it is packed with mounted shelves, rows of banquet tables, and various storage crates of all sizes. Hanging from the ceiling are fishing nets, scuba wetsuits, model airplanes, groupings of aluminum containers, styrofoam floats, a makeshift chandelier made of plastic spoons, a sequence of wooden birdhouses, and a plethora of plastic buoys that range in scale from the size of a bowling ball to a washing machine.
I pick up a small one to gauge its weight and notice the layer of residue on its surface. It is crusty, covered with dirt-webbing and speckles of hardened algae. Another buoy has fully formed purple barnacles attached to it, clustered growths that look like hollowed-out hills slanted with personality. They have sharp edges and appear more fragile than they actually are.
John established his museum in 2015. All of the objects in his collection came from the ocean, washing up on the shores of northern Washington where he has been combing the beaches a couple of times a week for the last five decades. These toys, kitchenware, water bottles, sneakers, and frisbees all offer partial stories of how we live out our daily lives through the things that fill up our world. Each object drifted on the surface of water for years, tossed by waves, swallowed up by unsuspecting marine creatures, snarled in trash piles and released, before finally making it to shore.
John has gathered the small disposable bits in the center aisle: hundreds of toothbrushes spilling out of a Tupperware container, combs stacked in a box, a jar filled with empty shotgun shells, a tangled-up knot of fish-shaped baits. The longevity of these objects is visible through their forms. I walk around this table, grazing them with my hand. The bristles of the brushes are worn out and discolored; the combs have dirt in their crevices. These things must have touched so many surfaces and so many bodies, used daily then tossed out. I am slightly repulsed by the thought that the material traces of each object’s intimate history is now on my hands. So many of these objects are older than me, just like their former owners. I can sense a glimmer of the lives they shared with their humans, and I can clearly see how their journeys through the Pacific gyres marked them, how the saltwater tainted their surfaces. These things rode the ocean currents through human and nonhuman worlds, and are now here on display, suspended in some sort of afterlife.
We will spend the next two days studying and documenting these objects. John and his wife Debbie have generously invited us to spend the night in their house next door, preparing two bedrooms for us. I got to pick first so I chose the beach-themed one. My partner and collaborator Ohan’s is hunting-themed, adorned with camouflage prints and taxidermy animals.
Selection of buoys from John Anderson’s collection. Documented on Rialto beach in Forks, Washington. Photos: Ohan Breiding
Marine Life
This summer, I lived in Venice, Italy, where Ohan and I went to research the politics of the ocean, listening to discussions on water pollution, environmental extraction, and migration, while reflecting on ways to listen to and learn from oceanic worlds and ocean-based knowledges. Both within and outside of the research, conversations regularly leaned into the MOSE system: a series of mobile floodgates installed in 2020 that are located at three different inlets into the Venetian Lagoon. The floodgate walls are located just under the surface of the water and appear, rising up, only when the tide becomes a threat, usually during the new and full moons.
While I never saw the MOSE in action—and you cannot see it out of action—I did start to notice other marks produced by the uneasy cohabitation of humans and the ocean. The owner of a vintage clothing store showed me a thin brown line on the wall that wraps around her store, evidencing how high the water reached in the 2019 flood. During the low tides, I observed that every object that came in contact with the water—the bottom of docks, submerged ropes, the lower half of wooden logs—was blanketed in a greenish-brown gooey substance consisting of barnacles, sponges, mussels, and algae that quickly proliferates under water. These marine species cling to human-made surfaces, changing their appearance and texture. This sheath looks icky to touch, but I suspect it would feel quite pleasurable to go ahead and do so.
Although “fouling” (or “biofouling”) species do many things, like filter particulates and improve water clarity, provide habitat, and offer an important source of food for many species including humans, they are deemed unwelcome in human-made infrastructures: invaders that reduce efficiency and increase the costs of production, maintenance, and oceanic transport. They cause corrosion, the deterioration of wood and metallic parts, material failure, and expensive repairs—all part of the hard-to-control effects of what theorist Anne Tsing calls “feral” growth.2 This growth marks the seam between non-human life and the built environment that humans construct and impose upon it.
Ducks eating marine “biofouling” species that are growing on the bottom of Venetian boats. Video: Cécile Hummel
Beginning March 11, 2011, two disasters unfolded in the Pacific Ocean. A magnitude 9 earthquake hit Japan followed by an approximately 130 foot tsunami, leading to nearly 20,000 deaths, as well as injuries, displacements, and the toppling of infrastructure across the Tohoku and Kanto regions. They also triggered the total blackout of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which caused the meltdown of its nuclear cores, a hydrogen explosion, and radioactive fallout.
In Radiation and Revolution, critic and activist Sabu Kohso unpacks how labeling the Fukushima nuclear disaster as a singular event implies that it was discontinuous from the systems of capitalist overdevelopment that continue to produce the conditions for future disasters. It also implies that the catastrophe ended. “The disaster is not over,” Kohso writes, “It continues in the repercussions of the event, like quakes spreading multidimensionally from an epicenter or devastations multiplying themselves from ground zero.”3
Being from California, I know earthquakes. They are endemic to the region. Twice a week, while commuting between Los Angeles and San Diego for school, I pass the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, also known as SONGS. Last year, during COVID lockdowns, the secluded beach just south of the facility’s monumental domes became a favored gathering spot for me and my Queer Surf Meetup friends. Hidden from the highway and shielded by jagged sandstone mountains, it felt otherworldly, like the safest place to be during the early days of the pandemic: away from crowds, immersed in water, and surrounded by a queer community of ocean lovers who were determined to claim space in a sport that is heavily white-hetero-male dominated. Safety can of course be a biased presumption—the existence of a nuclear power plant in an earthquake-prone region makes the risk of a similar catastrophic event quite great in California. But I did not feel this danger whenever I passed by or visited for the day. It is very easy to ignore the realities that reside under the surface, to block and push them out toward another’s purview of responsibility. We are taught to equate the imperceptible with the nonexistent.
As the construction of new nuclear plants are presently underway, there has been a peculiar discussion about how to keep humans away from nuclear waste sites that will still be toxic thousands of years into the future. Linguists posit that people cannot read texts that are more than a thousand years old. So as humans continue to generate nuclear waste, what kinds of signage do we need to convey that a site is detrimental to life long into the future? In 1981, the US Department of Energy gathered scientists and linguists to establish the Human Interference Task Force, charged with figuring out how to protect future humans from Yucca Mountain's radioactive repository, which was planned to be a nuclear waste site disguised as a mountain in the Nevada desert. While the lack of funding for this project led to its cancellation, writer Paolo Fabbri and semiotician Françoise Bastide, who were part of the panel, came up with a proposal: a cat that would turn green when it approached radioactive material.4 Scientists would genetically engineer a breed of cat to change color in response to radiation through enzyme interaction, a mechanism used to study cellular activity.5 By then circulating this image of a green cat as a warning sign of impending doom in our folktales and popular culture, the “ray cat solution” would trigger a fear-and-flight response in humans.6 While neither the Yucca Mountain nor the green cat projects came to be, nuclear plants continue to get built, despite the lingering question of what to do with the afterlife of their waste.
IDEA KASA in Cefalu, Sicily. Video: Ohan Breiding and Shoghig Halajian
During our travels throughout Italy, one day on our way back from a beach we encounter a green cat. We sense that this cat has been following us for quite some time; now it appears on the outer wall of a building. Overhead, a large marquee spells out the store’s name, IDEA KASA, which remains forever ingrained in my mind. We go inside, discovering a warehouse that is full (like really overflowing) with random knick-knacks, plastic toys, swimming gear, slippers, hats—as if everything unnecessary, every impulse purchase, was packed into one place. And this green cat, an inflated pool toy, gazes out at the busy street, deadpan, its greenish color a result of prolonged exposure to the sun. It’s likely been on display for many months, years? We can’t tell. But we both feel that it signaled to us, drew us into this empty parking lot. We are being watched by it, so we comply. We buy it, deflate it, and take it home with us. We designate it as the ghost of a future species following us around, sending us a message we have yet to decipher.
The word “tsunami” in Japanese (津波) translates directly as “wave in the harbor.” The crashing sweep of the great waves on the harbors and coasts of the Honshu region in 2011 led to the massive dispersal of objects in the Pacific Ocean. Countless items, from toys to motorcycles, docks to large fishing vessels, were cast into the ocean. They drifted on open waters for years until reaching the coasts of Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Canada. The waves also displaced nearly 300 species of marine organisms, which rafted thousands of miles on these objects, reproducing multiple generations en route. They continue to wash up today. Marine ecologist James T. Carlton, who we met last year, explained that these particular post-tsunami species have traveled farther than any other marine life. This phenomenon was made possible by plastic. While natural materials like wood decompose after long exposure to sun and water, plastic remains intact far beyond the decade-long journey from Japan to the West Coast of the US. Once these marine species arrive at the shore, they are deemed non-native, invasive, and a threat to local ecosystems. The dualism of native/non-native is a densely complex one given the broader context of the global circulation of goods, people, and viruses around the world, and the systematic need to control the migratory behavior of certain species over others. As a result, those species manifest a form of unwanted excess—an abject buildup at the threshold of visuality.
Japanese barnacle Megabalanus Rosa, documented through a microscope. This barnacle traveled over 10 years on a plastic buoy from the Tohoku coast in Honshu, Japan to the coast of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Video: Ohan Breiding and Shoghig Halajian
The periodic arrival of dispersed ocean objects, and the lives that inhabit their surfaces, gives form to the continuousness of the March 11 disaster. These arrivals move well past the singularity of the cataclysmic event, toward its ongoing processes: the mediation and utilization of the “disaster” for consumerist, developmental, and nationalist ends; the slow spread of radionuclide pollution in the environment; its impact on agriculture and daily sustenance; as well as its psychic residue in personal memory and practices of grief, survival, and resistance.
John says he doesn’t think these objects carry harmful amounts of radiation. The minor amounts of deposition have likely decayed or been washed away by months of pounding by ocean waves. He believes that our bodies contain more radiation than these objects, from eating fish, getting X-rays, and otherwise just living and being in this world. We are the products of nuclear weapons testing, after all, and there’s a lot more toxicity in the ocean than there is radiation held by these objects. John seems protective of his artifacts. I can tell from the tone of his voice. He knows exactly where each item goes. There is a real logic to the contained chaos of his museum. I follow his lead, and handle each object with care and caution.
Plastic
Ohan and I have been researching the entangling of plastic with our most basic systems of existence. Plastic is essential to most modern forms of sustenance and care, from food packaging to cosmetics to prosthetics—the list grows endless. Plastic is liquidity, modernity, rapidity; functionality wrapped up in a tangible thing. We hear that plasticity is life, that its chief characteristic, adaptability, is the same trait that allows humans to function and survive. This belief runs deep across current conceptions of productivity, value, and even empathy. We are asked to adapt to the most harmful of conditions.
Plastic began to enter North American households in the second half of the twentieth century, linked through marketing to modern ways of life in tandem with the emergence of new societal values. From a manufacturer’s perspective, the benefit of plastic is its ability to save time. Unlike natural materials (wood, metals, sand, rock), which come with a form and shape and must ultimately be extracted then sculpted to be of use-value, plastic is produced through the process of polymerization, through which synthetic materials are heated and shaped at the same time. Therefore matter and form are generated in one single gesture, leading to an incredibly time- and money-efficient manufacturing process.7
Dinosaur oil meme (www.memecrunch.com). Shared by Kate Hall
In the 1930s, DuPont Manufacturing Company were denounced as "merchants of death,”8 accused of encouraging the US to enter the First World War in order to create a military market for its products. Plastic was produced on a massive scale during the Second World War, its use including as synthetic rubber for tires and to insulate the RAF radar that would detect enemy attacks.9 DuPont also played a major role in the Manhattan Project, the research and development program that would produce the first atomic weapons—including the two detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. To shift this narrative and conceal their complicity, DuPont used advertising to brand their products as “miracles.” In the era of mass consumerism that followed the war, polyethylene became critical to the production of daily-use products, from Tupperware to squeeze bottles to hula-hoops, all of which were lighter, more flexible, and more disposable. A special 50-page insert of the 1947 issue of House Beautiful promoted: “Plastics… A Way to a Better More Carefree Life.”
Plastic obeys our needs. What was originally considered a cheap substitute, a replica of more refined natural materials like glass and wood, came to fulfill, even define, a core value of multi-functionality. The fungibility and “protean adaptability”10 of the material was sought after by manufacturers, and then heavily promoted in marketing campaigns that aligned adaptability with accessibility. The tension between permanence and impermanence lies at the heart of plastic. For mass consumption to work, consumers must continuously disregard any inkling of an object’s afterlife. The commodity’s lifeline is supposed to be finite: it fulfills its purpose for a desired and designated amount of time and then must disappear. This idea of objects as existing only while they are in use has ultimately shaped our conception of time.
Anne Carson writes that “How people tell time is an intimate and local fact about them.”11 The tick of the long hand approaching the short; the rumbling motor of a car tolerating rush hour; happy hour, after hours, the morning hour; the morning light, then bright noon when there is no warmth to the light—these incremental progressions organize and spatialize time for us. Plastic is one of the most intimate materials, caressing all aspects of our domestic, sexual, (re)productive, and public lives. But it also complicates the notion of locality, as its reach is both local and global, its scale potentially microscopic and macro. It is everywhere.12 And in being so, it must move to the beat of capitalism’s rhythm, both instantly and eternally.
Plastic also extends into the past. Its production entails reaching into the earth, unsettling varying geological strata, and extracting the material worlds—ongoing worlds—of past life. In her discussion of the Plastic Age, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent describes: “plastic is the upper layer of many layers of the past that have resulted in crude oil stored in the depths of the soil and the sea…”13 Yet plastic erases its own history, just as the commodity erases the social relations that are imbued within it. Plastic appears to be unbound to the materials of this world, and this is what it promises: a feeling of unboundedness, a better, more carefree life.
The objects in the back left corner of the museum get less colorful, display less branding. Stacks of plates, cups, pots and pans, Teflon non-stick surfaces, lightweight kitchen appliances, the stuff I grew up with but rarely paid any attention to because they were simply unremarkable, a discounted landscape of feminized labor. My gaze falls on a tiny spider that is moving across the face of one of the wider skillets. It feels hypnotic in the midst of all this visual and sensorial stimulation. There is a distinct smell in here. In the background, I hear John’s voice narrating the astounding stories behind the objects he periodically picks out and hands to us.
Mineko
Ohan’s family member Mineko survived the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Her husband did not. Much of Mineko’s family lives in Japan and were affected by the 2011 nuclear disaster, receiving small doses of the radionuclides that the reactors continue to emit. Mineko’s name means three cats in Japanese, her mother’s means four cats. For our project, she has been sending us recorded memories of her experiences before and after the tsunami. In one recording, she recalls the hazy experience of regaining her consciousness while floating in water, no land in sight, and noticing a small cat sitting on a wooden raft staring back at her. It was just calmly floating there nearby on the surface of water. She says they locked eyes and this is when she knew that she was still alive. It was the feeling of being recognized by another living being.
Mineko can’t remember the color of the cat, but in a later conversation she tells us it was maybe gray, then another time it was white. She now lives in Switzerland, a landlocked country, just down the street from the house where the physicist Erwin Schrödinger lived. Schrödinger came up with the famous thought experiment asking whether a cat placed in a sealed box with an explosive radioactive atom is alive or dead. This hypothetical scenario is meant to illustrate how quantum physics works, but it never asks the question: what color is the cat? Mineko is careful with her words when we discuss her experience of loss and grief after the tsunami. She has written extensively about it in her daily journals, all in Japanese because she is more comfortable writing in her native language, but also, she says, to be sure that no one in her immediate circle can read it. Now, she is slowly sharing memories with us on her own terms, at her own pace.
The post-tsunami plastic debris arrived on beaches covered in the grime of “fouling” ecosystems. Their belatedness is critical. As these objects drifted for years, life grew on them. As they drifted, we waited. Their overdue arrivals offer an alternative temporal framework to the persistent rhythm of production and consumption. These objects ask us to hone in on a different register, to observe rather than consume, to acknowledge lifespans of varying lengths despite the difficulty of doing so, and to tend to worlds that are and are not our own.
We leave John and Debbie, heading home. Somewhere between Forks and Seattle, we stop at a hybrid hardware and crafts store. Ohan goes inside as I wait in the car. My mind is overloaded with stories, one after another. I am grateful but also exhausted. Ohan returns within a few short minutes, gets in and extends their right hand out to me. They are eager to show me something, holding back their words. Their hand is formed into a fist, so I gently pull open their fingers and discover a small, green glow-in-the-dark cat sitting on their palm. I gasp in excitement and quickly snatch it from them. “It is here again, what does that mean?” This time it’s in miniature, only about an inch tall. I hold the cat up to my face, aligning it with the horizon of the road ahead. It has thin ridges on its surface to connote fur, and a fat tail perked up at the tip. It’s a lioness even though I think it’s supposed to be a common house cat. I wonder if it actually glows in the dark. I hold my hands together around the cat to shut out any light, then peek inside between my thumbs. There’s still too much sunlight. Ohan starts the engine, so I reach for my seatbelt. I open up the glove compartment and place the cat inside for safe keeping. I pop up the door and hear the latch click as it shuts closed.
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Thank you to Nina Hoechtl and Lee Relvas for the feedback, and to Ohan Breiding for the ongoing collaboration. This text collects memories, stories and lessons that were shared during the summer research residency at Ocean Space / TBA-21 Academy in Venice, Italy.
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Shoghig Halajian is a curator, co-director of the nonprofit arts space Human Resources LA, and co-editor of the online journal Georgia, which is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a Critical Gender Studies specialization at the University of California, San Diego, where her research explores contemporary queer aesthetics and performance through a critical race lens, focusing on artistic experiments with collaboration. She was a 2021 research fellow at Ocean Space / TBA21-Academy in Venice, Italy, in collaboration with artist Ohan Breiding.
February 14, 2022
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