 So my name is Jessica Varner, and I have the fun job of helping provide information and excitement and questions for the next two panels. But first, I wanted to thank Shria, Ella, and Danny, and really all of the technical staff. This kind of hybrid event right now is tough, and so just recognize that it's running super smoothly. So as someone who really bears the tired eyes of too many hours spent stuck behind a computer screen, as I slog to really finish my own book, I have the easy job of celebrating and bringing into conversation the scholars in the next two panels this afternoon. And these next two panels I'll frame just a little bit. Address how history, specifically art history, architectural history, and the history of design. And broadly, I'll lump these into how design historians can engage directly with and provide nuance for, challenge, illuminate, push against the history of plastics. These folks coming up, this is such important work, as these histories are often left out in part of the inheritance and transmission discussion, which was framed out in the morning. But understanding plastics is not as inevitable. In extraction, invention, production, and sales, histories within plastics are easily erased. As part of corporate operations or invention patterns through the making of broadcasting wires, the work to follow is from scholars doing the work to connect plastics to their politics, to resist the celebration of design through plastics, but to also provide histories that address the complex environmental, technological, scientific, and geopolitical nature of plastics. History is just one way to engage further in the discussion with questions of accountability and effects in plastics. And I'm happy to talk more about how these histories might be put into action over a tea or in one of the session breaks. But let's get started with the first panel. So I'll introduce the three speakers in this panel all together in one lump. And they'll come up and present. And then we'll sit all down together for a conversation. So first is Elizabeth Darling, a reader in architectural history at Oxford Brooks University. And her contribution to this panel is, quote, the complex life of the Bakelight wireless set. Elizabeth's work focus on revisionist histories of modernist cultures in the 1920s and 30s in England, including a book on reforming Britain from Rutledge and Wells Coat from RIB Publishing. Her current research focuses on the material and spatial cultures of broadcasting, specifically on the design and form of the BBC Broadcasting House and the wireless sets manufactured by EKCO. Alexander Davidson is an arts writer and lecturer and PhD student at the University of Liverpool. His contribution to the panel is on a comactic and colonial history of architectural plastics from 1948 to 1985. Alexander's work looks at architectural plastics, including essays in the Rutledge Handbook on Archaeology and Plastics and in the Bauhaus Magazine. And his dissertation spans, though it might change, dissertations always do, right? Spans really a history from the House of the Future in 1956 by Alison and Peter Smithson, the Grenfell Tower, among other case studies. And today he'll discuss research within that on plastics in humanitarian buildings and structures. And lastly, we have Charlotte Madder, who's a postdoctoral researcher and coordinator of the Art History and Global Context at the University of Zurich Institute of Art History. Her contribution to the panel is, quote, the personal is political toxic materials in art, end quote. Charlotte's dissertation, The Politics of Plastics, Feminist Approaches to New Materials in Art, really challenges gendered ways plastic was used in art in the 1960s and 1970s and focuses on feminist practitioners such as performist artist Leah Lubin, painter Carla O'Carty, and sculptors like Nika Dichel of Saint Fall, among others. Her research interests really span these questions that exemplify reworking feminist histories and art history, materiality, postcolonial, and transcultural approaches. Her work is published in many places, but including an essay on feminist withdrawals in art and texts there, conches from last year and is the initiator of a new research project on rethinking art history through disability. So let's start by welcoming Elizabeth Darling to the presentation stage. Thank you, Jessica. Wow, that light's really bright. OK. Thank you very much, Jessica, for that introduction, sorry, and to the Paul Maylund Center in V&A for the invitation to speak. I just put my first image up. That's me. OK, thank you very much, and good afternoon, everybody. I want to start my paper with this image. This was the starting point for my proposal. And it's an image which I first came across when I began detailed research into the Essex-based wireless manufacturer, EK Cole Limited, ECHO, in 2011. It was in a box of publicity material, pamphlets and photos, few of which were dated, but it seems likely that it was taken no earlier than the 1935 to 1936 sales season since the set we see, which is the SW86, was the export version of the AC86 set designed by Serge Chimaev, which was produced for that season. EK Cole Limited, better known as ECHO and on display in the exhibition, began in 1922, the same year as the BBC. Initially, it produced various forms of battery and an adapter to plug wireless sets into light fittings before it moved on to actually manufacturing sets. In 1931, it was decided that the company would produce solely in Bakelite, and they became known as a company that produced high quality and reliable sets. In the historiography, ECHO is a standard feature in the technical and more general histories of radio, largely because of its technically sophisticated sets. While in the design history literature, its decision to produce in Bakelite and to commission a group of young British modernist architects to design for them is understood as a key moment in the interwar design reform movement and an exemplar of contemporary advocacy for a closer relationship between art and industry as a means to revive and redirect the national economy, as well as to literally domesticate modernism by placing it in people's homes. These are, of course, perfectly valid ways to consider ECHO and the products that it manufactured in the 20s and 30s. But this photo, unlike any other in that box of publicity material or any other representation that ECHO, which I've since come across, points to other possible readings, other histories, which these objects might impart, and which relate directly to the theme of the conference. Moreover, the visuality of a photograph connects to my ongoing work on women and architectural culture and what is chosen to be seen and not seen in architectural histories. And from that, how a shifted epistemology might allow us to see fully women who have always been present in architectural culture in plain sight, then and now. Here, then, in plain sight is a consumer product produced by a Western European company, photographed in the Egyptian desert, center stage on its chrome stand, flanked by white men, presumably ECHO employees, but also by Egyptian men and the camels they command. What I want to do today is to look at this image, or start from this image, and begin, and this is very much a work in progress, to think about how a ubiquitous object like a wireless, not least one photographed in the desert, might serve as an index of the ubiquity of the colonial in British modernity. The radio was an object that, by the mid-1930s, had become what David Land's calls a counter-income or counter-status luxury, in the same way that a smartphone is today, and as a television used to be not so long ago. It was thus widely owned, something like 9 million licenses were held in Britain by the end of the 1930s. And it was thus so familiar that one might almost forget to remark upon its presence. But there it was, in living rooms, the length and breadth of the British Isles. And indeed, as the existence of an export model, and this photograph suggests, much further afield. So what I want to do in my time, oops, sorry, go back. Oh, how do I go back? Oh, then, sorry, is to talk about this photograph and the set in terms of two themes. I'm going to start with modernities and then move on to materialities. So to start with modernities, perhaps the most obvious way to read this photograph is to draw on existing and wider and very well-established narratives about the BBC's approach to broadcasting and thus to see it as a rehearsal of the idea of the radio as a civilizing agent. We might nuance this by drawing on Annibal Quijano's notion of the coloniality of power in which Europe, and especially Western Europe, and I quote, emerged as a new historical entity and identity, and quote, of a euro-centered, capitalist, colonial, modern world power that is still with us. And one consequence of this, he argues, was the emergence of an evolutionist historical perspective which posits the modernity of Europe against the pastness of non-white nations and also holds that in time, those non-Europeans might be Europeanized or inverted commas modernized. So we could see the SW86 wireless set as an agent of this process, both as a modern, mass-produced consumer object, symbol of Western progress and modernity, and also through what could be heard through it. And the BBC began its empire service in 1932, and a formal Egyptian radio service began in 1934. And it's also the case that ECHO by the mid-1930s was operating on a global scale, as I hope you can see from what is actually a very large map and was hard to photograph. This seems to show its export sales and manufacturing bases across the world. What also seems to be the case with ECHO is that the SW86 was exported also to the white dominions, and that at a time when national policies there around a white nationhood were beginning to emerge. So we might see the set as a reminder of how radio added a new medium to Perry Anderson's notion of an imagined community, this time of imperial white subjects. And in a recent BBC radio program, the actor, comedian, better known as Dame Edna Everidge, Barry Humphries, recalled how listening to a Bakelite set in his suburban home in Kew, Melbourne, collapsed geography and made him feel as though he were actually in London the epicenter of the British empire. So the wireless set could be seen perhaps as a peddler of whiteness, or depending on where you are, quasi whiteness. At the same time, the means by which the SW86 became a complete saleable object and an agent of whiteness relied on another experience of contemporary modernity, the production line. A primary reason to use Bakelite rather than would in manufacturing wireless sets was that it reduced the need for detailed production work that required expensive, skilled workers. The cost was in the machinery and the costs for the sets. In that way, a new world of work was created for women. And ECHO's workforce expanded from 1,500 workers in 1931 to 4,500 by 1937. And of those, the predominant gender breakdown seems to have been women working on the production line in the factory floor in Southend. These women, newly enfranchised after the introduction of universal suffrage in 1928, were harbingers of a modern white working class, each a potential citizen-consumer, not least in this instance, because their good taste was being trained by actually making the sets of which Nikolaus Pevsner would so approve in his 1937 survey of industrial art in England. It's the book in which he famously declared that 90% of British goods were without aesthetic merit. Such women and their families would form the basis of a new Britain as it reconfigured its place on the world stage and negotiated its relationship with its empire and dominions. To turn now to materialities. And what of the actual set in its materiality as opposed to its function as a medium? I've noticed that ECHO was among the first of the British wireless manufacturers to decide to specialize in Bakelite. Bakelite is a byproduct of the coal industry and the wood industry. It's a compound of carbonic acid or coal tar and formaldehyde. It could be produced either as a precast resin or as a powder mixed with a filler, sometimes sawdust, sometimes asbestos. This powder can be molded into shape through a combination of massive compression and heat. In other words, it has no inherent form. It also, as John Wyborn, who you see in this image standing up, who is ECHO's chief engineer, remarked in a discussion in 1936, did not have the inherent what he called interest that grain gives to a piece of wood. Thus he argued it is by its superior form that the plastic cabinet must make up for its lack of interest as a material. Thus Bakelite set multiple challenges for ECHO's designers, how to give form to two types of immateriality. Bakelite is a powder, but also the ether through which broadcasts were sent. Additionally, they also had to think about how to design most effectively for mass production. And it's usually agreed that coats understood both tasks best. Circular molds are more easy to press and also to get the cast out item out of the mold. And circular sets are also less susceptible to knocks. Bakelite is very brittle if chipped and cannot be mended. Meanwhile, the circularity of the motif in the AD65 set, which you see here, simulates somehow the way that the airwaves consolidate into sound through the valves and circuits of the wireless set to rephrase Mark's, all that his air becomes solid. Although Wyborn understood the importance of the form of his company's wireless sets, what I want to note here is how ECHO very often used the names of woods to describe the colors of these sets and very often empire woods, such as mahogany, which came from the West Indies. The term black is used for sets like the AD65 and also the variations of the 86. But I read this as probably signifying ebony, which came from Sri Lanka and parts of Africa. Other color names for their sets, such as ivory and jade, suggest both imperial and wider global trade networks. Although simulated, empire's presence was thus felt in the domestic interior. Indeed, we can understand sets like the ebony AD65 alongside the use of empire woods and vineyards in contemporary interiors, public and private, that the empire was and is in plain sight throughout the 20th century. A second feature of the SW86 and other sets by ECHO was the incorporation of a printed station scale within the cabinet. And ECHO was probably the first company to do this in Britain in 1931. German companies had been doing it since 1928. As broadcasting took off in the 1920s, there are a series of meetings among European broadcasters to apportion wavelengths to particular companies to avoid interference. This was done under the aegis of the presumptuously named International Broadcasting Union, which, as far as my limited research shows, only had European members in this period. This was paralleled in the development of pre-tuning technology, which made the operation of wirelesses more user-friendly. One result of this was the standardized station scale to which the listener turned the knob to the appropriate station. Andreas Fickers, in his marvelous 2012 essay on the station scale, describes the scale as a map of an imagined voyage through the ether. Equally, we might see it as a visible rendering of the Eurocentric ordering of the world and a further invitation, some, or all of the way, into European modernity. To conclude, this paper has sought, briefly, to expand the narrative of ECHO's 1930 sets and move it away from pioneers of modern design or exemplars of technical innovation by showing how sets such as the SW86, both as a medium and a material object, produced the colonial in everyday life and made it so familiar, part of the furniture, that it became not seen. By choosing to see this process, I trace one small part of the complex imbrication of the colonial project with the project of British modernity after the First World War and, perhaps, indeed, into the present. Thank you. The landmark ruling at COP 27 to provide a loss and damage for the financial governments primarily of developing countries that were, unfortunately, affected by the effects of anthropogenic climate change was an acknowledgement of the post-colonial legacy to the climate crisis. It seemed an appropriate time, therefore, to examine an earlier moment in history when British scientists were involved in globalizing post-independence economies in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and West Africa with promises of prosperity and freedom. In contrast, raising questions of the indisputability of British advice, British industry supported by a supposedly regulated, arcane British governmental body, the building research station, cultivated new post-independence markets for their products, as was the case with Nigerian plastics limited, owned by Unilever PLC. In the process, they helped to globally disseminate, in particular, a building material, plastic, is used by the construction industry as accounted for 20% of global plastics output since the 1960s and has been growing in tonnage each year ever since. And building practices which caused the construction industry to contribute 39% of all CO2 emissions, while only contributing 7% of GDP. Building on the work of Ian Jackson in the area of tropical architecture, this paper will attempt to globalize current conceptions of the building research station's colonial outpost, which is primarily focused on their West African experiments when, in reality, the plastics researchers tested took place everywhere from Malaysia to the Middle East via Ghana and Gaston-Watford. Through archival research, it was possible to expand our existing knowledge in granular fashion on the geographical location of accelerated tests on plastic lamina, which shows if Singer described as having taken place in the tropics. In fact, we're carried out by JR Crowder in Ghana based on his correspondence with ICI. In the paper's first section, I will attempt to globalize current understandings of building material experiments, which are mostly focused on the West African experience by showing the wide range of climatic conditions the researchers tested plus again, ranging from hot humid to temperate climates. In the paper's second section, I will carry out a close study into the research on glass fiber reinforced polyester GRP cladding in Q8. Raising questions of whether material testing was conducted at the highest impartial standard, the writing of the report on Q8 was characterized by a blasé tone and an attitude of can we more or less make this work to it with untold numbers of climatic caveats presented. Last and third, I will attempt to show the relevance and significance of the tests by showing how plastics were and were not used in practice. In the case of Q80 modern architecture and with what values have been attached to them by case study architects. From 1948 to 1985, the BRS tested building materials, not limited to precast concrete, structural steel, and garnet and bricks made of clay and fired by oil in a wide range of climatic conditions. By the 1940s, the UK BRS had established a need for experimenting on building materials that was not possible at their station in Gotham Watford. By 1948, the BRS had established for that purpose first fully-prepared colonial outpost in Kamasi, the West African Building Research Institute, quickly followed by another in Takarodi. From 1961 to 71, JR Crowder identified the need to undertake accelerated weathering tests on plastics as unlike other more established materials, they are not stood the test of time. For his accelerated weathering tests, Crowder carried out one based on a method popularised by the paint research station at the BRS laboratory in Gotham Watford while the test on weathering plastic laminate sheeting was undertaken in garnet. Showing their reception, Crowder received letters of thanks and appreciation, some providing samples of their own weathered plastics for manufacturers, including Dow Chemical, the Marley Targ Company, and Formic Limited, right up until the 1970s. In 1975, BRS staff travelled to Kuala Lumpur to train local personnel at the University of Malaya in operating weathering testing equipment to determine how plastics change in behaviour after six, 12 and two years' exposure to the hot humid climate of Malaysia. The research team discovered white PVC, especially in the second 12 months, weathered particularly well, whereas black PVC with a high carbon content and polythene in all colours weathered particularly badly. Showing the complete lack of knowledge in this area, in perhaps the most madcap experiment, Alan Penn ordered an arrange for GRP cladding to be tested for changes in surface temperature at the practically desert climate at the roof of a weather station by QA Bay. Through the above mentioned examples, it was possible to see how building material experiments were much more global in scale than has previously been acknowledged by historians in the case of plastics, and there was much more scope, therefore, for disseminating plastics globally than previously imagined. In 1984, the chance arose to experiment on two panels in the hot summer climatic conditions with the QAT Institute for Scientific Research, whose staff at their weather station gathered all the meteorological data needed. For this test, the team of researchers carried out a heat balance analysis of the measured panel temperatures and indicated how temperatures can be predicted. Moreover, by demonstrating each of their specialisms, it should not be challenging to identify what aspects of the experiment the contributing scientists were responsible for. Educated both in QA and at the University of Essex, Sammy Alaluri, a member of the KISR Laser Department, went on to build a comparable, a considerable publishing profile on optics, fluorescence, and methods for measuring global radiation. Of particular relevance, Alaluri published one study considering meteorological data gathered from a weather station on the roof of a three-storey building in the subsequent years of 1985, 1986, and 1987. Second, Adam Al-Adi specialized in the performance of building structures and components in hot climates. Head of the KISR Building Department, Al-Adi co-published one paper in 1992 on the performance of masonry walls. The third, Michael Quinn, Emirates Head of Building co-authored one publication on the effects of hydrocarbons on groundwater. A keen practice local historian, Alan Penwarden, supervised the project. Aside from his hobby, Penwarden's primary interest was in air movement and acceptable wind speeds in urban environments. In May 1985, Alan Penwarden published the results of the research project carried out in Q8 with the building's research station as their BRS note 6585 on surface temperatures in hot climates, calibration of standard GRP panels. As the abstract stated, the note reports measurements of the surface temperature of two specially-prepared glass fibre reinforced panels exposed horizontally at the Q8 Institute for Scientific Research. Penwarden and his team of researchers carried out these tests in combination with simultaneous meteorological data gathered, which provides estimates of the shortwave absorptivities and longwave emissivities of the surfaces. Based on their specialisms, it is my contention that Al-Aloori would have provided assistance, therefore, in gathering the weather data combined with Penwarden's strength in analysing air movement, while Al-Adeeb would have helped with creating estimates for heat penetration and absorptivity of surfaces. Rationalising his research, Penwarden claimed such a method is needed to provide design information further on maximum temperatures and temperature variations in the hot climates of regions such as the Middle East. Quote, Penwarden. Oh, okay. Yeah. Sorry. No worries, I was reading very slowly. Yeah. I will now cover some of the data collected. The research into surface temperatures demonstrated the significant role played by colour in how plastic surfaces heat up. At their most extreme, no other day during the recording period could beat day two in terms of surface temperature recorded with the highest temperatures of 77.6 Celsius for the black panel and 44.4 degrees C for the white. The weather conditions of day two were particularly prone to causing a high surface temperature due to a clear sky when direct normal radiation peaked at 860 watts per metre squared with 140 watts per metre squared in diffuse radiation. Concluding seemingly satisfactory, Penwarden ended the written part of the report by stating how the analysis by the researchers of the recorded surface characteristics of the panels, solar absorptivity, longwave emissivity and convection heat transfer coefficients were independent of each other and the researchers could not determine them isolated from one another. So I'll move on to the end then. Yeah. Through all of the experiments considered, we bear witness to the developing knowledge of a circle of researchers surrounding JR Crowder, R.G. Smith and Alan Penwarden, of how plastics behaved in different climates and its tantamount to colonization of building plastics from Europe and North America to what we today call the global south. The above cannot be viewed separately from the dispersion of plastics into every conceivable facet building from the 1930s when Bakelite surfacing predominated through to the thermal insulation and even windows coming to be replaced with plastics alternatives most rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s. Further research will reveal the extent to which British industry, supported by a supposedly regulated governmental body, was responsible for global plastics dissemination. Though it is all poised very interestingly. Okay, so yeah, thanks everyone. Just bibliography here for you. Once hailed as substances of the future, the many shortcomings of plastics have by now entered the collective consciousness. At the heyday of the plastic age in the 1960s, countless artists and designers reveled in their dazzling colors, manifold textures, inexpensiveness, and connotations of modernity and space exploration. But today's associations with plastics are quite different. If plastics used to be considered sick in the slang meaning of the term for awesome, they are now seen as downright sick in the pathological sense. Toxic, polluting, carcinogenic symptoms of a diseased world. Plastics from their manufacture to their disposal produce and reproduce social inequalities, which in turn have a direct impact on health. As materials in art, they can hardly signify anything else any more than decay, pollution, exploitation, and globalized consumerism. Many artists working with plastics today use them precisely to draw attention to the very wrongdoings caused by these materials. And yet, why contemporary artworks addressing plastic pollution do offer entry points for public discussions. It may help raise awareness by reaching their audience on an effective level that is potentially more effective than facts and numbers. They also run the risk of aestheticizing climate catastrophe and ultimately normalizing it. The anti-colonial scholar of environmental action, Mike Slipvoron, has importantly argued that the most pressing issues with plastics are less photogenic and often not even visible to the naked eye. Slipvoron provided a compelling example of this by illustrating a report on plastic pollution with a bland view of the ocean, seemingly showing nothing except the gentle ripples of the water and the clouds in the sky above, which in fact depicted an area with high concentrations of marine plastics. Taking a cue from Slipvoron's photo, I would like to ask, what do art and art history traditionally centered on visual phenomena have to do with an issue that eludes divisible as opposed to the dramatic images of animals entangled in plastic waste or the dystopian views of contaminated habitats we have become used to? I want to consider the invisible pollution of plastics, that is, the way plastics can enter bodies and make them sick. Drawing on the examples of artists who fell ill from working with plastics in the 1960s, I will reflect on the toxicity of plastics precisely to argue that sickness is not an individual fate but rather entangled in social and cultural contexts, in line with the feminist notion that the personal is also the political. For artists could only have fallen ill with from them because harmful products were on the market in the first place. And they continued to fall ill because art schools put too little effort into protecting their students' health and because the productivity-oriented art world cared little about the subject of illness unless it could capitalize on it. Along with Johanna Hedvers' sick woman theory, I will therefore explore how, quote, it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick. Numerous artists and designers explored the use of synthetics in the 1960s and many of them fell ill with them. Yet the topic remains largely unaddressed within art history. For artists themselves, however, the issue was and still is a pressing concern and most of them have something to say about the dangers of materials, whether through their own experiences or anecdotes. I myself first came across the issue through conversations with artists. For example, with Susan Santoro, a member of the Italian feminist cooperative Beato Angelico, who experimented with polyester resin in the 1970s. When I visited her a few years ago during an otherwise exceptionally open and generous discussion, her only reaction to my investigation of plastics was one of total repulsion. Horrible materials, she replied in disgust, alluding to her own bad experiences as well as those of befriended artists. Perhaps the first to comment publicly on the toxicity of plastics in art was the sculptor Robert Mallory who had started experimenting with different kinds of plastics already in the late 1940s. In an article with the evocative title The Air of Art is Poisoned, published in Art News in 1963, he described how he had suffered poisoning from the solvents and plastics he had been using. All of us tend to assume that if a material is really dangerous, it will not be found on the market, Mallory amused in his essay. Unfortunately, such is not always the case. Mallory was particularly concerned with raising awareness for the issue amongst fellow artists because it had taken a long time and numerous experts to arrive at his diagnosis. Yet he was also witnessing that many of his peers working with plastics were experiencing similar troubles. The symptoms that Mallory described range from chronic fatigue and cramps to severe headaches and weight loss. In some cases poisoning went along with psychological symptoms such as irritability, depression and anxiety which sometimes led an illness to be dismissed as psychosomatic by doctors, friends and family, as well as the persons concerned themselves. Mallory's article apparently failed to elicit the broad attention he had hoped for and subsequent reports on the health hazards of art materials likewise remained niche topics, although they're directly concerned and affected many practitioners. Meanwhile, artists kept falling ill from plastics. Rebecca Horne, for instance, suffered from severe lung poisoning caused by the toxic fumes she inhaled as an art student. As Horne recalls, around 1967, I began to make large sculptures using polyester and fiberglass without using a mask because nobody told us it was poisonous. Aggravating an acute tuberculosis, she had previously contracted the lung poisoning compelled her to a long hospitalization followed by a year-long stay in a sanatorium. Horne never again used plastics, but the themes of illness, immobility and vulnerability, all linked to her poisoning from these materials continued to accompany her work. Arguably, plastics informed abate ex negativo, her entire subsequent practice, both in terms of subjects and materials, such as natural feathers and soft bandages which she deliberately chose in a departure from the harmful synthetic substances she had formerly used. Niki de Sainte-Fall, on the other hand, claimed to hate plastics for making her sick, but never stopped using them. She had fallen severely ill while working on Le Paradis Fantastique, a collaboration with Jean Tangeli for the French Pavilion at Expo 67, for which she used 400 cubic yards of polystyrene, two tons of polyester and five miles of fiberglass to create nine monumental sculptures. Sainte-Fall experienced severe breathing problems, fever and weight loss and was hospitalized for one month. But she continued to work with Folliasta throughout her career if only with the help of specialists and always wearing a protective breathing mask. Similar to Horne, the topic of illness remained important in her work and led her to later become involved in the prevention of HIV and AIDS. Sainte-Fall also became an advocate against occupational hazards in art, warning other artists about potential dangers. As she later record about her initial use of polyester, in 1964, no one knew very much about this material. It was new and in the experimental stage. Only much later, after I had ruined most of my lungs, did I realize how dangerous this material was. It almost cost me my life. Based on a review of the medical records of Sainte-Fall, the rheumatologist Henning Seidler has later put the statement into perspective. Seidler argues that occupational exposure to plastics contributed, quote, in part or temporarily to the artist's lung disease, but was neither its main nor only cause. But this finding does not change the fact that plastics impacted her health, whether their effects were concomitant or temporary, does not undo their harmfulness. Such debates are, however, symptomatic of the discussion about plastics whose harmfulness often remains ambiguous. Similarly, the untimely death of Eva Hesse in 1970 at the age of 35 has been the subject of much speculation. Many wondered whether her brain tumor was related to her exposure to her polyester and fiberglass and muse that she does died from her art. Hesse began using latex in 1967 and proceeded to use fiberglass and polyester, resin from 1968 on. A keen interest in the materiality of plastics attested in the title of her solo show, Chain Polymers, was not lost on curators. As one of few women, she was included in numerous exhibitions on the topics such as made of plastic, a plastic presence, or plastics in new art. In her posthumous monograph on Hesse, Lucy Lippert noted that many friends had come to speculate about the artist's increasing health problems and, quote, began to wonder if they were not caused by the fumes from the synthetics she was using, end of quote. Though her doctors apparently found that the tumor had already begun to grow before she started working with plastics, the question remains ambiguous. Speaking of her illness, fellow artists Robert Mangold, for instance, mused that maybe it's not true, but many people thought the materials she was using were part of the problem. A lot of artists were working with polyurethane and other materials that had extraordinarily strong fumes. I'm not sure what kind of mask were worn. Hesse indeed seems to have taken few safety precautions when handling her working with materials. As her collaborator, Doug Jones, recalled about the production of Right After. I'd make these strings maybe 20 feet long of gooey fiberglass. We had gloves on, these plastic gloves, and we just threw them away. The stuff was dripping all over the place and we were bumping into it. We had it in our hair, in our clothes. Several photographs showing Hesse engaging with her materials indeed seem to testify to her playful and sensual approach to them, posing in her studio or in this portrait with her head tucked between the plastic fillness of Untitled or Not Yet. Most humanly, sickness and death have become privileged, sometimes oversimplified keys to framing her work. According to Anne Wagner, Hesse's untimely death has meant that she has survived to play a special cultural role. Forever under 35, she answers a hunger for youthful, tragic death. She is the dead girl, the beautiful corpse who counts for so much in so many cultural narratives. Wagner has thus advocated for depathologizing the conception of Hesse and of the woman artists more generally. Problematic as it may be, I would like to counter that the answer to quote the association within patriarchal configurations of femininity with the pathological in the words of film theorist, Mary Ann Donne, cannot consist either. It enables exclusion of the subject of illness. For one, Hesse often addressed herself the subject of illness. In fact, she related the experience of disease to the materials she was using. When she was asked in early 1970 whether she was concerned with the idea of lasting, Hesse made a connection between the transience of plastics and her own life. She was aware that the latex she had been using in her sculptures was not a permanent substance and admitted that she felt a little guilty when people want to buy it. I think they know, but I want to write them a letter and say it's not going to last. A few years after her death, several of her works had indeed already disintegrated while others had undergone noticeable changes in surface and color. Moreover, although Hesse conceded that illness had precluded certain things, she also discussed how it had allowed other things to come into being. In particular, she considered how her method of working had undergone changes and become less constrained once she allowed the help of assistants. Illness and vulnerability may thus be understood along with Hesse as an opportunity to challenge the solitary and heroic notion of artistic genius and to uncover the production of art for what it usually is, namely a work of collectivity in whose making many people contribute visibly or not to conversations by procreering advice and resources, including labors of love. Rather than tending to the sexist image of the dead girl, one could thus relate Hesse's statement to a headrest notion of a sick woman theory and their call for a radical kinship and interdependent sociality or politics of care. To conclude, it is not my intention to turn the story around by emphasizing the silver lining to the illnesses of these artists, but rather to start a conversation about what can be gained from addressing the issue in the first place, from making visible the invisible but insidious pollution of plastics, beginning with the intimacy of the body, to argue that personal experiences of illness are invariably also political. Within a field of art history, I also feel committed to addressing the issue because its very invisibility is just another symptom of the ableism in the art world which either ignores stigmatizes or fetishizes chronic illnesses. Hedvast's suggestion that the, quote, most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself, end of quote, is diametrically opposed to what plastics stand for, accelerated globalization at the expense of human and more than human life. A politics of care is precisely what is needed in the world's response to plastic pollution and just as much what is needed in art and art history. That's it. If you wanna stay and if Alexander and Elizabeth wanna join us on the panel, I think we have time for a couple questions but wave at me if we don't, one or two at least? Two, three, got it. I feel like we need more time for questions. I feel like there's so much that bubbled up as you all were chatting and talking through fascinating projects. I'm going to start with the first question and then I'll open it up to the audience or online to get things going and complete. So something I want that's really present in all three of your work and the work in plastic histories in general is the difficulty and resistance encountered in the actual physical work of doing the history, like the archives that aren't there, the histories that aren't told, the photographs that don't quite have the right note because these technologies, plastics and histories of sickness really resist archival, sometimes collections and questions. So I'm interested just in all three of you maybe to answer, what are some of the difficulties that you counted doing this work because plastics sometimes can also flatten? I'll start with you, Elizabeth, if you don't mind because I feel like you're is attuned to this question. When I started sort of doing the prep for this paper, I went through all the notes I'd made over the past 10 plus years about echo and plastic history and it really struck me how the sort of gaps and non-thinking about where these products were sold, why they were sold, it's just not in the literature. There's no mention of echo's global markets or even radio's global market in the literature that I had looked at in the past. So that struck me as evidence of the very significant kind of shift in methodologies and epistemologies which have come in the last maybe five, 10 years and kind of that was also evidence of the way maybe the archive had shaped those interpretations but also how the positions from which those historians or radio nerds as they often are, which very much shapes the literature on radios, also shape the archive and in terms of what was kept. So Southern Museum has the most extraordinary collection of echo sets but its archival holdings are very limited and it has some holdings but there's no business archive. For what was a very major company which ran until the sort of 70s, there isn't the material that you would expect so you can't even find that material if you wanted to. And I don't quite know why that is because it was obviously important to them, it was a huge part of their business. So it's that frustration you have as a researcher, I think that you kind of have to either think outside the box and kind of find other places. I imagine that you probably have that particularly. You have your eyes under also. Well, with particularly with God's plastics, I think the situation is sort of improving. Much the conversation has shifted from, like you were talking about as seeing them largely as like symbols of design history maybe 10 years ago to sort of, yeah, people starting to think about the environmental aspect that comes across in archival catalogs. Design history asks different questions often. And you, Charlotte? Yeah, same here. I mean, obviously because it's a subject that hasn't been talked about within the field of art history but more from practitioner's side. So there's not an archive of this. It's also more like stumbling upon things. And obviously one important part would be speaking like doing oral history, but working on artists that have been, that were active in the 1960s and 70s. And obviously with working with these materials, many of them are not here anymore to talk about that. Tell that story, absolutely. Any questions from either online or the audience to open it up more of a conversation? Yeah, there's one in the back if the mic thinks. And if you say your name too, it also helps. Hi, my name is Nanjala and I'm very fascinated by the echo sort of conversation and the fact that it starts at the same year as the BBC because that's also, and I'm sorry this is really more of an invitation to respond, it's not a question because of the connection between the radio set, the radio and colonization is still very much present today. And the dependency on the BBC for information, you know the closure of these services in the last year, there's I think the Persian services closing, the house of services closing, all of these services that are really part of a colonial legacy where information is part of the colonial legacy. I just found it really fascinating and I'm just curious to hear if that's also part of some of the questions that you're thinking about in your research or it's something that's on your reader? I think it's a question that what I just started revisiting kind of makes me aware is opening up and how you, is that interesting, and there's a sort of tension between, I don't want to sound like a horrible program, I haven't heard Max this morning, there's the kind of the complexity of that kind of Western modernizing project which sees this sort of mission to kind of civilize and all those kind of awful horrible words. Yet also maybe that there's a context in which that radio can be, those broadcast might be owned by people who are hearing them, sort of Walter Benjamin kind of talks about how radio should be just one way, it could be two ways, and it opens up all those kind of questions, and it is clearly part of a particular vision of the centerness of Britain as a kind of radiating kind of thing and how you kind of document that and how you register that, and also, I think one of the things I'm really interested in that kind of, that lovely term entanglement that came up this morning, it's just so much there and it's how you, maybe all you can do is represent it, I don't know, so it's opening, yeah, it's a bit of a can of worms really that I've kind of realized just revisiting this mysterious made me think very differently from how I was trained to think as well, and I think that's what's interesting. Having done this for quite a long time now that you kind of realized, I'm entrenched in this particular way of thinking which I now need to kind of decolonize myself. Yeah, so great, it's opening up. Any questions from online or the audience? Yeah, thanks. Yeah, there's a question from Max Liboron, which is for Charlotte, which is can you expand a little bit more on ableism in the art world in relation to toxic materials and perhaps extrapolate or generalize to plastic pollution activism or science as well? Right, I think the ableism in the art world is so rampant that I don't even know where it's started. And it has really literally, it's just an invisibility of the topic, let's say it like this. And I just became aware while preparing this talk, I wasn't able to insert it, but that there's a group of artists, activists in Scotland they have written a manifesto called Not Going Back to Normal. Maybe some of you are familiar with it. And it's really interesting because it's addressing the fact that the whole world became aware of the very vulnerability of our bodies through the pandemic. And now everybody is talking about going back to normal, but this normal is just a normal for the able-bodied persons. And I feel a little bit the same within the field of art and art history. There has been a huge surge of shows exploring the topic of care recently. And I am a little bit afraid that it might just be something that is just fashionable right now because everybody feels suddenly for a very short minute somehow related to the issues, but that will possibly get lost. But there are, on the other hand, this I really want to emphasize there are many, many highly interesting artists working precisely on this intersection of art and activism against ableism and yant. And there's a great issue of art and America and disability in art. That was true. There's lots of fur around these questions, and hopefully they don't go away for sure. And all the scholarship, thank you so much all for your fascinating work in a short period of time and we'll continue the discussion after the break.