Christopher Sejer Fischlein
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Christopher Sejer Fischlein's MPhil/PhD Art research project
Toxophore: Navigating Chemical Intimacy
The practice-led research project examines domestic chemical exposure through ethnographic and participatory moving-image practice. It focuses on how individuals with heightened sensitivity navigate low-dose and cumulative exposure to petrochemical-based materials as a routine and unevenly distributed condition of contemporary life.
The project approaches chemicals not only as environmental hazards but as materials that actively shape relations between bodies and surroundings, to explore how exposure is perceived, managed, and embodied. The lived experiences and bodily impacts of low-level exposure reveal a critical gap between the effects of chemical exposure and the legal and economic parameters of institutional recognition.
This research addresses that gap by examining how individuals cultivate situated forms of sensing, care, and risk negotiation when biomedical and regulatory systems fail to recognise harm, and how these practices challenge dominant evidentiary models.
Film functions as a core research tool for developing methodological approaches attuned to the slow, diffuse, and complex nature of chemical exposure. Through participatory moving-image work, it traces how exposure influences the body across time and within everyday routines. These practices will enable alternative forms of articulation to support the recognition of low-dose and cumulative exposures and how such forms of harm might be understood and acted upon.
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