The New Wilds

The Anthropocene can appear as an illusion or a nightmare. But in Fos-sur-Mer, an industrial zone near Marseille where most of the oil consumed in Europe is imported, stored, and refined, it’s a reality. It is one of the most polluted regions in Europe.

The Anthropocene has a date and a birthplace: in France, it is the 18th century, for example around the Étang de Berre. Louis XIV had a gunpowder factory built there, followed later by soda, copper, and lead factories, as well as oil refineries... While dangerous and polluting sites multiplied, their presence remained localized, and the Étang de Berre, a constellation of ponds west of Marseille on the edge of the Camargue, was still a Provençal paradise.
In the 1960s, the DATAR established an industrial-port zone there to compete with Rotterdam, then the world’s largest port. Fos-sur-Mer imported, stored, and refined most of the oil consumed in Europe. It has become one of the most polluted regions in Europe.
Heavy metals, hydrocarbons, chlorine… so many “new wilds,” as anthropologist Anna Tsing names them, because these stored, circulating, or transformed substances are as uncontrollable as a river or a climate. It is through these new wilds that I propose to tell the story of this region.Through a protocol that borrows from chemistry I saturated the colors involved  in industrial processes : cadmium yellow or cobalt blue, the pigments that make up colors come from the heavy metals processed in Fos-sur-mer, ambivalent products that pollute as much as they allow us to see.