Exposed acid

Iuliia Gataulina. From the photographic project ‘Exposed Acid’

Photo project, 2025

Location: Outokumpu, Finland

“Exposed Acid” is an experimental analog photography project that investigates the socio-material conditions of toxicity in contemporary late-industrial ecologies.

The photographs depict various machinery and infrastructures of the former copper mining site in Outokumpu, Finland, as well as the nearby Lake Outolampi, which functioned as a mining waste area. Prior to development, the film was soaked for several hours in water collected from this waste site, rich in sulfuric acid. The acidity disrupted the materiality of the film, revealing its corrosive and decomposing effects. Sulfuric acid thus became a co-author of these images.

This photo project ultimately attends to how toxicity emerges from an assemblage of forces – political, industrial, and biochemical. The photographs depict the agents behind the creation of toxic ecologies in Outokumpu, Finland: the corrosive, agentic forces of sulfuric acid as the primary chemical species driving these ecologies, as well as the mining infrastructures that enabled the creation of sulfuric acid in its abundance in the first place.

The process of collecting acidic water and checking the pH