MENACING ARCHIVES

Trucks dump garbage at Fresh Kills Landfill, May 1973. Photo by Chester Higgins with the EPA, via Wikimedia Commons.

Soundless gratitude to Orchid Tierney for "Menacing Archives," her thoughtful engagement with The Republic of Exit 43 at Jacket2, which offers an interpretation of collage as a ragpicking ecology, and leads readers across the sprawl of this site-[un]specific documentation of environmental injustice. "What kind of pastoral, then, is the hazardous waste site? How to make material and sticky its cancerous violence? Perhaps garbage and toxic waste should stick to us like burrs, not only because industrial contaminants pollute drinking water and soil, but also because they ground us in the infrastructures of failed regulations, racial injustice, and corporate complicity."