Attuning to Chemical Atmospheres in Pilsen’s Industrial Corridor

The Environmental Protection Agency’s threshold limit policy produces an image of the world in which contamination is presented as an object that is able to be abstracted from the environment and managed using technologies of enumeration. In the Mexican-American neighborhood of Pilsen, located on the southwest side of Chicago, residents face debilitation and discomfort due to threshold-based policies. Under this regulatory approach, both community members and lands are not viewed to be ecological and entangled beings but are instead understood as objects that have specific capacities for assimilating industrial chemicals. Through ethnographic research, this paper explores an alternative sensory regime of perceptibility—a way of conceptualizing, relating, and responding to the figure of contamination rooted in sensory attunement and embodied experience. This modality, which is practiced in a multitude of different ways by community members, opens up possibilities for imagining alternative environmental regulatory structures. In order to investigate the multiplicity of bodily attunements to Pilsen’s chemical atmospheres, I also use multi-modal research methods to stage two installations that explore how bodies interact with the affective intensities of contaminated geographies.