How can ­we talk artistically about the contamination of the world by chemicals? How can we bring to light this invisible aggression that causes subtle alterations both inside and outside of us? How can we respond imaginatively to the violent colonisation of the body by chemistry?

Chemical Stories / Chemical Bodies examines cases of pollution and contamination in an attempt to understand the form of representation that each case induces.

Between January 2024 and June 2025, two cases were studied. The following text describes these two cases and the forms that emerged from them. It also outlines the foundations of a grammar for the visibilisation of contaminations (in progress).

Case no. 1

Årté, couye, cadåve¹

A brain cancer narrative Namur Case no. 1 begins with an encounter during the screening of a film I made on the issue of pesticides in Belgium.² Antoine is in remission from brain cancer.³ When he expresses himself that day, it is to assert that his illness is a direct result of his contact with contaminated environments. Among other places, Antoine lived next to a farm that used many pesticides. We meet several times in 2024 to delve deeper into his story.

The form that Antoine’s case took owes much to practices from Latin America stemming from decolonial and feminist geographical research, particularly the concept of body-territory.⁴ This concept was used in the first place by researchers—in an attempt at participatory science—to enable women who have been victims of violence to tell their stories. On tracings of their bodies, these women wrote down both the blows and injuries they had received and the geographical locations where they had received them (home, street, etc.), forming a bodily/topographical map of the violence they had suffered. This research was then picked up by environmental researchers to establish a link between a polluted territory and bodies affected by contamination.⁵ In both cases, the aim is to inscribe the sites of violence directly onto the assaulted bodies.

It was while working with Antoine that this idea of exploring the concept of body-territory took shape. However, there were a few questions. Is it legitimate to use, for what he has experienced, tools forged in decolonial and feminist struggles? It seems to me that this can only be done by invoking a second concept, that of molecular colonialism.⁶ This concept supports the idea that colonialism has taken on a new, insidious and contemporary form: the contamination of bodies by chemicals in the context of intensive agriculture and the industrialisation of South American economies. Even though he lives in a medium-sized town in Wallonia, in a region where legislation on the use of chemicals is relatively strict, his body has very much been subject to this new molecular colonialism, which knows no geographical, physical or gender boundaries. As such, the violence he describes is part of the lived experience of molecular colonialism. His intimate territory, his body, and the narrative he has made of his illness can in turn contribute to the vast history of body-territories that have been disrupted, violated and weakened.

As an artist-researcher working in the field of environmentalism, it is important for me to question the way I work. It seems appropriate to study the territory where I find myself, what is happening where I live, reducing the environmental impact of my activities as much as possible. It should also be remembered here that, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Wallonia was the site of one of the world’s largest experiments in industrialisation and pollution, enslaving bodies and environments and leaving permanent traces in our soil and waterways.⁷

Let’s return to his story, which I will call an illness-narrative. By illness-narrative, I mean the way in which a person constructs the story of their illness based on the information available to them. Depending on the era and geographical location, the illness-narrative may invoke, for example, magic and witchcraft, or chemical pollution of the environment.

Three types of illness-narratives emerged during my work. The first is a prediction: “Given where I live, I am at significant risk of developing an illness.” The second is intuitive: “I am in the process of experiencing a change that is leading to illness, but I don’t have the tools to identify the source of the threat.” The third, which includes Antoine’s story, is therefore a reconstruction of what may have led to the illness. The focus is on nodes, events and spaces – places, durations, parts of the body – of contact.

He has constructed this illness-narrative based on the information available to him. This does not mean, of course, that it is precisely those points of contact that he has identified that brought about the illness. But this recognition of points of contact tells us about the pollution bath in which we all move—the permanent risk, the permanent contact, and the amount of information available to each person to form an idea of what is happening to them.

And indeed, is the information available to him accurate? Could his story be part of a broader illness-narrative, which would question the same areas of contact and draw the same conclusions? His story would then fit together with others to begin to form islands of truth. What would science say about the link between brain cancer and the use of chemicals? And what would activists say?

Antoine lived for a very long time next to a farm where pesticides were used. If we look at the scientific literature, no direct links between brain cancer and pesticide use have been proven, but it has been shown that the two phenomena are strongly correlated.⁸ A cohort study called Agrican (Agriculture and Cancer), which has been following 180,000 members of the Mutualité Sociale Agricole [Agricultural Social Mutual Insurance Company] in France since 2005, has found an increase in brain cancer cases among farmers who use pesticides, particularly products from the carbamate family. The most widely used pesticide in Belgium, at least until 2023, was mancozeb, a carbamate pesticide used in potato and fruit farming. Carbamates are neurotoxins. They were developed to attack the nervous system of insects. Living next to a potato or fruit farm is therefore a risk factor.

If we look at the knowledge of activists, we first notice that they are organised. In hindsight, Antoine established connections, his story connecting to other stories, fitting within a broader context of chemical violence. His story echoes encounters I have had, particularly with the Collectif de Soutien aux Victimes des Pesticides de l’Ouest [Support Group for Victims of Pesticides in the west of France]. Founded in 2015, this collective has drawn up a map of victims centred on the west of France.⁹ We talk at length with one of its founding members, who explains to me how, little by little, brain cancers and neurodegenerative diseases have become increasingly prevalent among the illnesses affecting agricultural workers. I learn that France now recognises these diseases as occupational illnesses, thanks to the court cases brought by associations. What science struggles to prove, fieldwork can reveal and make us think about.

Case no. 1 gave rise to a video creation and a series of photographs, with various attempts to make the body a territory and the territory a body.

The forms of case no. 1

Audio-video creation
40 min.

Photographic series

Case no. 2

Fé l’ djårdén¹⁰

The story of the Bressoux allotment, Liège

In collaboration with butoh dancer Maki Watanabe¹¹

In 2016 gardeners from the Bressoux community allotment (Liège) wanted to have the soil they were cultivating tested for possible contamination. Given the high levels of contamination in their plots, the Institut Scientifique de Service Public (ISSEP, [Public Service Scientific Institute]) was commissioned by the public authorities to search for traces of contamination throughout the allotment and in the gardeners’ bodies.

To carry out this study, researchers took soil samples and collected blood, urine and hair samples from volunteers. The levels of heavy metal contamination (lead, arsenic, cadmium, zinc and PAHs)¹² were also very high in the bodies. The question then arose: Could the community allotment still be used or should it be closed? Is the pollution of the allotment an exception in Bressoux, or is contamination the rule?

Part 1

From January to March 2025, I was invited by ESACT (Liège) to lead a workshop on a case of contamination.¹³ I had heard about the Bressoux allotment and chose it as the subject of my research. I wanted the students to be able to experience a place, visit it and experience it, so that they could then turn it into an art form. I wanted—still within an environmental perspective—for our work to be rooted in the area where their school is located. Together with Maki Watanabe, we set up a performance and butoh dance workshop with five students (Véronique de Liamchine, Gabriel de Halleux, Olivia Matalon, Matteo Bixio, Selma Norret-Terraz). The workshop ended with several public performances at the end of March 2025.

I gathered a range of materials: scientific studies, Heiner Müller’s text Héraclès II¹⁴ and movements borrowed from butoh dance. The aim was to embody this pollution, to experience the turmoil it causes, and to perform the allotment and contaminated sites of Liège with “butoh-ised” bodies.

What is butoh? Few physical disciplines can respond more precisely to the question of the contaminated body than butoh. Butoh is a dance form that was invented in Japan in the second half of the twentieth century. It has often been likened to the US’s detonation of atomic bombs on the territories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a dance that is also regularly described as a dance of spectres—and spectres, for the Japanese, are rooted in the ground. In this dance, the body is not considered to be a vehicle for the expression of beauty; butoh doesn’t like fluidity. It likes unrecognisable bodies, gnarled and strange. The extraordinary richness of the butoh imaginary, its sensitivity, its ability to bring about instantaneous mutations and to disturb our understanding of the body provided a playground that each of us appropriated with our awareness of the search for the contaminated body.

To talk about this relationship with the world that we seek together through dance, I here transcribe what one of the performers shared with us at the end of the project. Selma Norret Terraz wrote: “I believe we are preparing ourselves to listen to and hear what is not visible on the surface. A ceremony of the sensory, where we offer the body the opportunity to fully express what is happening inside. To make everything vibrate: blood, organs, cells, bacteria, letting the heart take control of the machine. […] A ceremony that would allow us to bring all the inner vibrations to the surface of the skin. From the skin to the ground and from the ground to the skin. […] This ceremony is about putting our contaminated bodies to work. […] Making them natural landscapes […] Returning them to what they are at their most microscopic level, most fragile, most powerful, most alive. […] We would like the ground to stop sucking in our feet, the wind to stop making our heads spin, to walk without always having to fight against the path we are crossing, to inhabit floors and walls that are no longer enemies or battlefields.”

In the work process, we dance in different places of contamination and industrialisation: the allotment, of course; metalworks in the process of being dismantled; and a nature reserve that is in fact a hotspot for zinc pollution.

Incorporating, embodying the places, then bringing these forces back to the stage. Anchoring the territory in the body.

Just as Antoine’s cancerous body, in the first case study, was the site of cancer in remission, Liège is a territory in remission. Being in remission does not being cured: “In cancer-treatment, doctors usually avoid the term ‘cured’ and instead prefer the term ‘no evidence of disease’ (NED) to refer to a complete remission of cancer, which does not rule out the possibility of relapse.”¹⁵ The territory of Liège is home to a dormant disease. The students live in this world. They work to be inhabited by this world.

We bring these bodies back to the stage, where they embody pollution through dance. We confront these bodies with scientific texts and research on soil pollution. The contact between the butoh bodies and these abstruse, anti-theatrical texts works curiously, almost like meditation. This encounter makes theatricality possible, even desirable. And it invites a particular scenic space.

The stage design is developed during research with the students. The aim is to be able to inhabit the contamination and intertwine the scales of this pollution-based violence. In other words, to conceive that violence in one particular place has effects on several scales. Or that violence on one scale may be invisible on another.¹⁶

The work seeks to intertwine the elements of contact. Two tents are set up in the large shared workspace, each of which can accommodate around ten people, including the actors and actresses. The tents have an extensible texture and are the colour of skin, the idea being to turn the stage into a living body. Part of the audience can watch what is happening in the tent, but most spectators must remain outside. The actors in the tents wear microphones, so that the audience hears the same thing inside and outside the tents, but does not see the same thing. A difference of scale.

This raises several questions for the spectator: What can I, or do I want to, see in what I hear? Do I want to move and enter a tent, or change my perspective on what is happening on stage? Or do I want to stay in the same place the whole time? The audience questions its position, and sometimes puts itself in a position to be seen, to be a presence on stage, without having to do anything. Even if we listen and watch, even if we are only witnesses, we are part of.

In this experiment, there was the possibility of going beyond representation to share a common experience. It wasn’t strictly speaking a performance because the entire experience was written and staged with precision. But in any case, sharing offered the possibility of being included in the environment of the piece without for all that being obliged to participate (i.e. having to speak or become an active force). One could move around within the performance, as one moves around in a museum. The performers were hybrids, neither quite actors nor quite dancers. Fragile.

Form of Case no. 2 / Part 1

Performances, March 2025
With the students of ESACT,
135 min.,
Butoh, text collages¹⁷ and videos

Part 2

In June 2025 I went to the allotment with a film crew.¹⁸ Earlier in this text, I mentioned the differences in scale. The fundamentally different yet inextricably linked nature of the experiences that could be had in the allotment. And the coexistence of these experiences in the same place.

All of our work with the students focused specifically on pollution, through a Japanese dance that could be described as underground, with scientific research as the only textual material. It seemed necessary to me to listen, not to the allotment, but to its gardeners.

If the theatrical device consists in embodying an idea, focusing on a theme, representing, the device of the documentary encounter is a taming, an opening up to the multiple experiences that pass through the allotment.

This second part therefore examines how we adapt to a situation, but also what the scales of priority are. It shows that an emergency or danger, such as this latent pollution, does not prevent us from continuing to practise the allotment.

In contact with these gardeners, so many other issues emerged, seemingly just as pressing: tensions between people from different migratory movements; climate change making it possible to grow fruit from the Mediterranean; questions about conviviality when language is a barrier. On a case-by-case basis, tension also arises over the place of women; geopolitical tensions seep into the allotment.

The acceptance of pollution says something about a certain environmental injustice. When the pollution was “discovered”,¹⁹ the wealthiest Belgians left the allotment. Others—Serbs, Croats, Kurds from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Palestinians, Dagestanis (revealers of the historical layers of conflict and exile)—stayed on or took the vacated places. Was this due to a lack of information? Or is it because the disadvantages of contamination are largely offset by the advantages of having a plot of arable land?

Lastly, there is the issue of the allotment’s very survival. For the association that manages it, there has been a twofold constraint since the pollution was mentioned in the media. It must both take concrete measures to protect residents from the heavy metal contamination that has been detected and find ways to communicate positively to the outside world to ensure that the health authorities don’t decide to close the allotment permanently.

Form of Case no. 2 / Part 2

Documentary (in production)

As a form in progress. Each case studied contributes to the grammar of visibilisation. No definitive form is satisfactory. Hybridisation, reassembly and evolution are more apt to account for the dynamism of the questions asked and the cases explored. The material produced can be rearranged as encounters and needs arise, and it helps to map these narratives of life with pollution.

A new case is scheduled to be studied in September 2026 at the École de Théâtre du Rhône in Geneva, in collaboration with performer Solange Schifferdecker. This will be case no. 3.

Another videographic illness-narrative is currently being edited. It is the story of a farm worker who used a large number of pesticides and developed a debilitating allergy to chemical odours. This will be case no. 4.