Tracing Toxicity

On the threshold of conservation, issue 7 of the online journal Troubles dans les collections, brings together the work of researchers and artists who are rethinking the practices of conservation and transmission, in museums and beyond. Along three axes – reversals, restlessness and residues – the contributions question the coloniality of certain institutional approaches, amplify the movements and impulses that animate and displace museums, and open up perspectives for new approaches, relations and gestures.

The basis for the contribution by CML researcher Flavia Caviezel is the essay, “Toxic Leftovers of Collecting” (Caviezel 2022: 69-78), which deals with the processes involved in decontaminating asbestos-contaminated vintage cars in a Swiss foundation’s collection. Extending the body of research to its relational contexts of more-than-human ecologies, this contribution focuses on asbestos and rubber components that contain asbestos, both of which are built into vintage cars. Following the traces of these materials offers insight into the post-/colonial entanglements of the mining, processing, and trading industries. Tracing as a practice of artistic research addresses the fragmentary nature of those transnational ecologies and the emerging multivocal, multilocal, and multisensory narratives by spinning mental networks between the multifaceted fragments connected to the collection objects.