Toxic Temporalities & Machines in the Anthropocene’s Garden

This paper examines the Cork Docklands as a site where toxic temporalities become legible within what Bruno Latour has termed as the Critical Zone (Latour, 2020, p. 2) - the fragile, overburdened stratum in which geological, ecological, and socio-technical processes collide. Rather than approaching the Docklands as a post-industrial landscape awaiting remediation or renewal, the paper treats near-abandonment as a historically produced condition in which time itself has become environmentally compromised. Drawing on Robert Smithson’s entropic aesthetics and his concept of “ruins in reverse,” (Smithson, 1967, p. 54) the paper argues that toxicity in the Docklands cannot simply be confined to residual contamination or industrial afterlives. Instead, and in our characterisation of it – explored through text and a display comprising drawings and Polaroid instant photographs - the site exists in a state of anticipatory decay. In this version of things, the site exemplifies how nature and infrastructure co-produce a chronic, entangled disorder that does not immediately yield to the conventions of normal technocratic management. Instead, and resisting valorisation – it offers us ongoing delayed visions and different states of dereliction that collapse into one another where toxicity reveals itself as the foreclosure of genuine futurity – rather than merely revealing ongoing fields of polluted matter (air/ soil/ water). In this state, the place takes-on the form of a secondhand temporality where landscape is increasingly mediated through masterplans and renderings, rather than sustained inhabitation or use.  It produces a temporal distance that anesthetises any sense of ecological urgency – displacing the site into a mediated temporal register, while turning lived time into an afterimage of planning. In these ways, it configures the landscape in a suspended present where temporality becomes thickened and stratified: a chronotope of prolonged degradation where time itself has become environmentally noxious. Read this way, a view of the site emerges - not so much as a construct understood as a failure and needing to be corrected but one that becomes a crucial new index within the Critical Zone.