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In The Pink: Lively Architectures of the Death Cloud

Animation, Cartography, Architectural Devices, Writing, Film

Text originally published in Sonic Acts Ecoes Magazine, 2021.

This text extends research from In The Pink, a project developed within the Royal College of Art, 2020. This project was nominated for the 2020 RIBA Presidents' Silver Medals and received the RCA SoA Student Award, 2020. The film created as part of this project was displayed within the Beijing Biennale 2021.

In The Pink formed the basis of the book Horizontes Rosados. Arquitecturas viventes de una nube toxica [Pink Horizons. Living Architectures of a Toxic Cloud] which was edited by Carlos Segura and published in San Jose by Operaciones Editorial in 2021.

Collaborators: Jingru (Cyan) Chen; Elise Hunchuck; Marco Ferrari; Thandi Loewenson; Beth Hughes; Carlos Segura

Our world is weirding, and so are we. Western consumer culture has displaced earthly materials, rearranging their molecular composition while reordering their terrestrial position. Infrastructures have spread over Earth’s surface, from mines pushing deep into the ground to satellites held in orbit in the upper atmosphere. The resulting chemical trails and toxic build-ups have remade Earth's image, and it is becoming unrecognisable. New worlds have formed from within this waste and residue. Oil has become carbon dioxide, uranium mines have become toxic dust clouds, and metal ores deep in the ground have become old laptops' shells in waste heaps. From within our waste-filled world, creatures and critters have begun worlding weird worlds of their own. weird worlds of their own. These are strange and resilient critters that prosper from the wastelands and lay claim to human detritus. Alliances form between species and infrastructures, and through these assemblages, new landscapes are imagined. They live among the remains of consumption and depend on the waste of the past to forge new futures.

Advances in science and technology have blurred the boundaries between the human and non-human. Rosi Braidotti describes this as the posthuman convergence, where acidified oceans and warming climates happen at the same time as caregiving robots and technological advancements. Weird assemblages appear to burst out of this convergence, in spaces where human residues come to define landscapes and chemical waste covers the ground. Examples of these include the atmospheric fauna that thrives in our polluted air. These wildflowers flourish in car exhausts, berries that thrive in radioactive fallout, algae living from carbon molecules on ice sheets, toxicity-resistant killifish, polythene-gorging Pseudomonas bacteria, and microbes thriving in arsenic-rich sediment. Bodies ooze together, connecting through tendrils of biochemical flow in a landscape of fluxing metabolism.

An assemblage may mean a gathering of things, connected through time or space, embedded in one another’s existence. According to Anna Tsing, ‘Assemblages are open-ended gatherings [that] don’t just gather lifeways; they make them.’ The openness of the term hints at the multiple spatial scales involved in these relationships that allow consideration of things moving through one another at a molecular scale while also stretching out over vast space. This form of an assemblage is a weird one, making connections between things both at the scale of a landscape and the scale of a toxic particle.

Weird assemblages include living and non-living, human and non-human, sentient and non-sentient bodiesobjects. Air, chemicals, species, seeds, toxins, infrastructures, living and dead bodies may be found merging and conjoining in consumerism’s chemical debris. Weird things bring forth a reckoning of global weirding that opens up spaces between previously perceived known truths. In these gaps, alternative futures can be imagined. Weird assemblages teach us a vital lesson of resilience and multispecies collaboration and demonstrate what it means to live in the residues of a post-industrial Earth.

Nikel’s death clouds
The atmospheric co-dependency of toxic nickel, sulphate aerosol and Trichoderma fungal spores is an example of a weird assemblage – a new entity between the dead and the alive. This assemblage forms in the air and ground of the Russian monotown of Nikel in the Norwegian-Russian border zone, in the Arctic Circle, near the Kola Peninsula. The Kola Peninsula is one of the epicentres of extractivist operations in the Russian Arctic. Since the 1980s, metal smelting practices, among other noxious events, have caused the formation of deathly clouds, which leave toxic footprints as they fall to the ground. Nornickel, Russia's largest exporter of metals and one of the country’s wealthiest companies, owns the smelter. It is surrounded by over two-thousand square kilometres of dead zones. The area is characterised by deadly diseases, dead forests and dying flora and fauna such as pike, salmon, herring, reindeer, lichen, soil bacteria, moose and arctic foxes.

Mapping the landscape’s toxicity, caused by the deposition of aerosols, outlines the footprint of the death cloud over the Kola Peninsula. Sulphate and nickel aerosols are the midwives of Nikel’s ecological dead zones. The toxic nickel aerosol, which comes from deep underground in the metallic ore, occupies the death cloud as a fine aggregate that eventually returns to the ground in snow or rain. The nickel can cause lung cancer, hampers vegetation growth, and accumulates in aquatic food webs, causing larger taxa's widespread demise.

Metals often form in sulphuric ores, deep underground, from the remains of ancient volcanoes. The smelting of metal, such as nickel and cobalt, releases these ores' sulphuric elements into the air. This means that sulphuric accumulations in the air and soil are a common consequence of metal smelters. The sulphate aerosol scatters light within the death clouds, giving them a strange pinkish hue. By tracking the intensities of pink sulphur deposition across the landscape, we can locate the northern hemisphere's metal mining and smelting sites. Sulphates and sulphuric acid form when sulphur reacts with water. These acids are responsible for the scolding of the leaves in trees and other flora when they fall to the ground. When sulphuric acid enters the ground, it leaches vital nutrients and metals from the soil that then flow into the rivers causing damage to the riverbeds and fish. High levels of sulphur in the air can cause respiratory diseases in humans, by causing oxidative damage to the lungs in the form of scar tissue.

Opportunistic fungal spores
The death clouds’ inhabitants are different forms of aerosol. Aerosols are tiny solid particles suspended in the air and act as condensation nuclei for water droplets to form in the cloud. They accumulate, assemble and seed the cloud, creating forms, obscuring sight and controlling earthly experiences. These are aerosols of ash, metals, water, salts, drops of acid, carbon, dust and so on. Atmospheric aerosols mix in a soup of matter derived from human systems’ debris, such as carbon, matter derived from the natural world, such as the vapour from plant and animal matter, and bioaerosols, the microscopic life that occupies the skies. These entities converge in the atmosphere to form clouds teeming with living and inanimate matter. The human and non-human join to create an ethereal body in the sky. Through the gathering of clouds, the atmosphere is a site of posthuman convergence.

A zoological garden of cosmopolitan aeroplankton, the atmospheric alternative to marine plankton, lives on and within this atmospheric aggregate. Tiny bacterial and fungal lifeforms drift in the air and are distributed around the world in climate belts. Fungi produce 50-million tons of airborne spores every year, enough to coat every square millimetre of Earth’s surface with a thousand spores. Airborne microorganisms contribute to the pool of particles nucleating the condensation of water in the atmosphere, and they are thus likely to be involved in cloud formation. Aeroplankton, such as fungi spores, were potentially the first organisms to seed clouds and engineer the weather, building for themselves highways and rivers in the atmosphere for their conquests in air, water and soil.

Galina Evdokimova from the Kola Research Centre has identified the many living inhabitants in Nikel’s deathly air. Her study claims that the atmosphere’s industrial composition stimulated the development of specific airborne fungi populations, which are different from sites within the Kola Peninsula’s with much cleaner air, such as the Rybachy Peninsula and the Pasvik State Nature Reserve. This means that different industrial or urban complexes create their specific ecologies in the air depending on the particulate matter that arises from them. In Nikel’s case, these are mostly opportunistic fungal spores. The These increase by 20% in polluted air, with some, such as Trichoderma fungal spores, only occurring in air around Nikel’s industrial sites. Trichoderma fungal spore's increased by 40% in the polluted areas around Nikel’s industrial sites. They seem to seek the toxic air and deathly hues of Nikel’s death clouds. Trichoderma spores latch onto the airborne nickel and sulphate aerosols, using them as transportation devices in the cloud. The high levels of particles in the noxious air provide more aggregate for the spores to assemble and move around. The fungal inhabitants of Nikel’s atmosphere interact with soil, water and creatures. Collectively, they form a weird assemblage of the alive and the animated that disassembles dichotomies of life and death and finds potential where both exist in abundance and as a result of the other.

When the Trichoderma spores, with their nickel and sulphate companions, fall toward the ground, they may encounter mountain birches. In two generations, this diverse taxonomic group has developed a resistance to the metallic toxicity that surrounds the Nikel smelter. The leaves of birch trees contain microscopic hairs and ridges that act as aerosol traps as they reach out into the atmosphere. The birch trees act as toxic terraformers; they encourage the death cloud to land as it passes through them. When it rains, nickel and sulphate particles resting on the leaves are washed off and fall to the ground. The previously airborne spores fall with them and enter the soil in search of tree roots. The roots secrete sugars into the soil to entice the fungi towards them, where the spores will germinate and burst forward, tangling with the roots beneath the ground. The weird assemblages spread from air to land, with the tree and fungi participating in a constant exchange of resilient chemicals in the tree roots. Metabolic interaction can be observed and understood over time as the material exchange that forms resilience in these death cloud landscapes.

Becoming weird(er)
Weird assemblages form in the cloud’s debris and toxic residues of infrastructural processes nourished by the cloud’s metallic air and acidic soils. They occupy the death-cloud landscapes and form alliances within them. And through them, a multitude of life characterises the region. Studies of these assemblages help us understanding our polluted grounds and atmospheres as lively, queer and resilient. Weird assemblages, such as Nikel’s deadly clouds or trees entangled with fungi caused by toxic particulates, are recognisable yet fantastically strange – like science fiction characters. These assemblages, which occur as a chimaera between the alive and the animated, challenge neoliberal approaches to material, space and life. They reject dualism in favour of a view that accepts a myriad of differences between entities. Donna Haraway describes this as ‘living in the compost’, while Rosi Braidotti urges us to keep complexity in mind through ‘multilateral differing’. They are weird in how they position understanding by breaking down the notions of toxin, containment, survival and living. Weird landscapes spread and envelop as these assemblages occupy and rebuild the ground and air.

Timothy Morton discusses the term ‘weird’ as something connected to happening or becoming. Weird can refer to a between state of being, where one thing is morphing, becoming or transmuting into something else entirely. Landscapes that are struggling and transforming as they react to Earth’s damaging pollution can thus be understood as weird landscapes. Nikel’s assemblages of sulphate, nickel and fungal spores are weird because of the weird loops of unintended causality that led them to exist together. And they are weird in appearance. The assemblages are not visible to the human eye and cannot be pictured through traditional means. Electron microscopes can reveal the existence of each of these particulates, and Galina Evdokimova’s study also shows their presence. However, the only way they make an appearance that can be registered through human experience is through the clouds’ formation.

Metabolic devices
Weird assemblages do not just inhabit spaces of residue and waste; they remake and rebuild them. The relationships that they form physically shift material through a metabolic exchange. Bodies merge across landscapes aided by tendrils of molecular, biochemical entanglement. Mountain birch photosynthesises carbon from the air to create sugars that pass to the fungi in exchange for the valuable minerals the fungi draw from the ground. Through their relationship, molecules are rearranged between land and air. Small, resilient and seemingly healthy birch trees have started to appear on Nikel’s toxic edges, forming a new landscape in the metallic footprint of the death clouds that led to their continued existence. Meanwhile, in the atmosphere, the fungal spores transform the cloud from a toxic gathering to a place of residence and transportation. Without any human intervention to enable them, the tree and fungi create new worlds from our harmful residues. It is an image of a living and vibrant future on Earth.

Nikel’s weird assemblage does not collaborate with humans but with the technological apparatus and chemical residues of human-made systems. But what could become possible if designers, architects and thinkers started consciously collaborating with the many inhabitants of the topographies of our making? In the misty landscapes where human and non-human now conjoin through metabolic exchange, we can learn from their mutual resilience methods through interaction and entanglement. Designing collectively with weird assemblages would involve tapping into and moving with the landscapes’ chemical flows — becoming weird with them. Here, metabolic devices are imagined as architectural interventions that engage with these assemblages and build purposeful resilience with human and non-human inhabitants alike.

A possible example of this in Nikel is a sap-tapping device. This device would draw the sap that bounces between the leaves’ tips and the fungal entangled root system below. Mountain birch sap is rich in polyphenol antioxidants, which can reduce oxidative damage to the lungs caused by the death cloud’s air, and betulin, which can cause apoptosis in cancer cells. A second metabolic device could be a fermentation apparatus that suspends the tree sap in the clouds as they thicken and descend into fog, carrying with them the many populations of airborne fungi and bacteria that gather in the noxious air. As the fungi land in the tree sap, they would germinate and grow, colonising the sap as they feed on its sugars, fermenting it in the process, and releasing vital chemicals. When humans drink the fermented sap, they invite the fungal and bacterial inhabitants into the human microbiome and mycobiome. From within the gut, they would improve human immune systems, while they flourish and grow, building hardy and resilient populations of their own. A spore catalyst would act as another metabolic device that operates with the release of fungal spores in the spring and summer. The creation of an electrical atmosphere, signalled by a sulphur sensor sending pulses of electricity around the wire fencing of a fungal garden, around a fungal garden would encourages fungi to release spores en masse. Since fungal spores can nucleate clouds and encourage rain, the spores released would encourage an atmospheric washout of toxic aerosols, reducing the possibility of damage to the lungs.

These devices act to embed humans in the assemblages, slowly reforming the landscape into one of resilient collectivity. Metabolic devices would occupy and proliferate withinthrough the world that weird assemblages construct through their activities and exchange. Using these small landscape interventions, the weird assemblages in the landscape extend, seep and flow, slowly involving the culture and bodies of humans within their open-ended gathering. The activity created around these devices builds knowledge and understanding of multispecies coexistence, while directly engaging human bodies in the chemical exchanges that generate resilience in the damaged landscape. Weird assemblages are amplified and further take hold of the activities of the landscape. The remains of the death cloud become enlivened with the busy exchange and merging e the activities of the world that the weird assemblage has created.

Weird assemblages exist in the spaces where the human waste and non-human entities interact. Understanding weird worlds and weird inhabitation allows an imagination of collective and conscious collaboration with these assemblages. The world is getting weird (and weirder), and we should too. As the clouds settle and hazy fogs form, their inhabitants merge, exchange and flow through one another – spore, tree, fungi, rock, aerosol, cloud, forest, sap, sugar, root, device, human – in a brilliantly weird assemblage.

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