That new carpet smell: Chemical kin-making

• In Event: COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities 2: Art and Practice

Abstract

In dominant American and European narratives, kinship is typically traced by biological “blood” ties, such as parent and child or marriage/law. McCarthy and Edwards (2011) note that historically, kinship “refers to formal systems of relationships with regard to alliances of marriage and lines of descent” often valuing biological reproduction. However, contemporary understandings see kinship also denoting wider family connections. Haraway (2015) stretches the practice of kinship further. According to Haraway, “kin-making is making persons, not necessarily as individuals or as humans.” For Haraway (2016), making kin is a process which requires sympoiesis, or making-with, rather than autopoiesis, or self-making. She writes, “making kin and making kind (as category, care, relatives without ties by birth, lateral relatives, lots of other echoes) stretch the imagination and can change the story” (2015). How might making kin and making kind with toxics, and others within chains of exposure, change the story? Toxics such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including the evaporation of formaldehyde from carpet. How might kin/esthesia, or imaginative indices for sensing and tracing toxics movement through bodies and across kin empower different accountabilities and move from individualistic damage centered narratives? Writing through a chemical frame, Agard-Jones (2016) emphasizes that chemical exposure emerges as another form of kin-making, and explicitly refers to the affinities that are formed by those that share chemical exposure as “chemical kinship.” Arguing that it is through the circulation of chemicals and associated narratives about “contamination, accountability and communities of chemical injury” that kinships are formed. This paper explores chemical kin-making through a reflection on artworks that highlight shared modes of sensing toxicities, reflecting specifically on VOCs. As Haraway states, “staying with the trouble requires making odd kin.”

Author

• Susanne Pratt, University of Technology, Sydney