This project explores the long-term impact of agrochemical modernization in El Ejido (Spain), the largest concentration of plastic greenhouses in the world and one of Europe's most intensive agricultural zones. Beneath these structures, over 30% of the fresh vegetables consumed in the European Union are produced and sustained by intensive pesticide use and migrant labor. This highly technologized landscape embodies the core tensions of the contemporary ecological crisis: persistent chemical residues, labour precarity, environmental racism, and global food dependency. This crisis is already shaping the present and will define the conditions of future human and more-than-human life. Its roots are historical, emerging from unequal relationships between societies, technologies, and environments sedimented over decades of agricultural development.
To trace this genealogy, "Toxic Archives" proposes to conceptualize the soil of El Ejido as a socio-chemical and historical-political archive. The project critically engages with archival epistemologies and contributes to debates on the co-production of scientific knowledge and social order, the verticality of environmental risk, and the politics of waste and memory. It offers a model for integrating oral history with digital tools to reveal the hidden infrastructures of chemical exposure. Through a combination of scholarly outputs and public platforms, "Toxic Archives" aims to reshape how we understand the ecological legacies of intensive agriculture and the ways in which communities live with—and resist—toxicity.