Unsettling the Chemical Gaze

Artistic research on pesticides and toxic labour in European foodways

Abstract

This article advances a reformulation of Hannah Landecker’s concept of the ‘chemical gaze’ through artistic research. Instead of framing matter as a site of extraction and profit, the chemical gaze is reimagined as affective, uncertain, and embodied, attentive to uneven toxic relations in contemporary food production. The discussion centres on Exposición, an art-science exhibition created during a residency in Bern, which examined pesticide exposures and the precarious, gendered labour underlying strawberry cultivation in Huelva, southern Spain. Through multisensory installations combining sound, scent, visual media, and ethnographic testimony, the exhibition invited audiences to engage with the entanglements of agrochemicals, migration, and reproductive justice. The article situates this practice within interdisciplinary debates in feminist science studies and environmental humanities, demonstrating how arts-based methods can unsettle dominant imaginaries of agrochemicals and vulnerability. It reflects on the ethical and political stakes of representing toxic labour, the curatorial challenges of working with testimony, and the limitations of aestheticization. Ultimately, it argues that art-science collaborations can generate plural, critical, and sensorially attuned ways of witnessing and contesting toxicity across intimate and planetary scales.