Atsunobu Kohira’s “Seek Hope, Who Enter Here” is a statue for the “dark side of Newtown Creek” in the words of the artist. With dark side Kohira refers to the materiality, the blackness of coal and of its by-products, tar, petroleum and plastics out of which Kohira crafted a 12ft monolith, on view at the Chimney. The plastic waste was collected in the gallery's surronding in Newton Creek, a river part of the Hudson Estuary, flowing west for 3.5 miles between Queens and Brooklyn and emptying into the East River. The monolith is a piece of garbage archeology, exploring the waste habits of the people living and passing through this part of Greenpoint in Brooklyn. In the manner in which it addresses discarded commodities the piece enters the meshwork \cite{Ingold_2002}, or the combination of life threads tying the lines of embodied experience of the New Yorker of the present with the (dark*) ecological and material histories that made and re-make Newtown Creek.
Maspet Kills, English Kills, Dutch Kills. The early human history of the creek is carried in the names of its branches. Indians fished the creek and named its overflowing tidal streams, before it was used by both the English and the Dutch for agriculture and industrial commerce in the Seventeenth Century. Later it hosted the first kerosene refinery of the country and the first modern oil refinery. In the 20s and 30s Newtown Creek was a major shipping hub, becoming the home of sugar refineries, tanning plants, canneries and copper wire plants. Thanks to little or no regulation of these industries until the 20th Century, the slowly accumulating impacts of industrial pollution on both citizens' health and the environment were largely ignored.  The polluting history of Newton Creek peaked with a 13 -17 million gallons underground oil spill (known as the Greenpoint oil spill) caused by Standard Oil’s companies, the largest oil spill in the country’s history. The health and environmental impacts have been the subject of court litigations between Standard Oil successor companies, such as Chevron and ExxonMobil, and Greenpoints' inhabitants. Still today millions of gallons of sewage water are dumped at various Combined Sewage Outflows (or CSOs) along the creek. The remediation work to clean up the site, declared a Superfund site in 2010, are expected to take at least another decade.  The kind of remediation has yet to be selected but it is likely to involve techniques such as dredging the toxic sludge accumulated in the river bed to dump it in other "safer" underground facility.  This begs the question: isn't there a need for other kinds of reparations and what may these look like?
Kohira’s monolith evokes the extractive landscape of Newtown Creek in the newly found materiality of once decomposing organic matter turned into plastic forks, spoons, bottles and containers held together by shiny tar .  In this way the monolith enters into a relational dialogue with the cultural, politico-economic structures that made Newton Creek. Indeed we are reminded of, and become concerned with, the past as a history of resource extraction, energy and commodities production of the nascent U.S. capitalist economy, together with those of the chemistry of the climate and the life of non-human entities. The audience is asked to reflect on the "multiple spatialities that co-exist" in and of themselves and which are brought to the surface within the gallery space, and how these are "bound to be differentiated across the many subject positions" \cite{Green_2012} of citizens, oil corporations and wildlife inhabiting this stretch of land. At its best the monolith collapses time and space revealing the unstable layers of place asking the audience to care for these histories in the present, as politics. At its worse, it may lull us into a toxic sublime \cite{Peeples_2011}. After all, who recognizes toxicity and in what ways? I took part in the symposium organized to discuss Kohira's work in light of the Anthropocene with an audience of predominantly artists and academics. The symposium highlighted this long history of the creek brilliantly exposed by Willis, an organizer at the Newtown Creek Alliance (NCA). However, this was just an instance. How will other viewers engage with the legacies that this piece conjures upon us? Will they go beyond its aesthetic qualities?