Breaking Points: Mediated Contaminations, Infrastructural Toxicity

This paper examines the entanglements of visuality, infrastructural violence, and toxicity in the mining region of Matimekush–Lac John (MLJ) and Schefferville, Northern Québec. Centered on the red waters case - a contamination event linked to a mining basin breach - it highlights the disconnect between local concerns, scientific assessments, and governmental responses. The paper examines the role of media and visual documentation in making contamination within environmental governance. Furthermore, drawing on slow and infrastructural violence (Nixon 2011; O’Neill & Rodgers 2012) and bad land relations (Liboiron 2021), it critiques dominant toxicity models that isolate species from their relational contexts. In doing so, it proposes the concept of infrastructural toxicity to capture the fundamental colonial disruptions embedded in extractive infrastructures.