ABSTRACT
This paper thinks about infrastructures, forms of life and time in a site inundated with industrial chemicals. It is temporal aspect of chemical infrastructures their slowness, their persistence, their creeping accumulation, their latency that this portrait of the St Clair River emphasizes. As site of a chemical infrastructure, the St Clair River is not only a buzzing node in North America's petro-chemical network, it is also a landscape saturated with the effluent of industrialization. Importantly for the chemical infrastructure of the St Clair River area, Certificates of Approval are only facility specific and hence do not consider the possible cumulative effect to a region that has a concentration of industrial facilities. Aamjiwnanng First Nation, the violent effects of externalized chemical excess has been tracked in the last decade by locally crafted community health surveys, and body maps that have documented the embodied effects of living in Chemical Valley. Sirens too are part of the chemical infrastructure, auguring its possible future.
