The Brio Memory Project is about cultural amnesia and community trauma caused by industrial pollution affecting local environments, neighborhoods and workplaces.
The Brio Memory Project: Extraction, Erasure, and the Power of Remembering is a series of landscape interventions and video installations that address long-term consequences of industrial pollution on individuals, communities, and on the land itself. Using the Brio Superfund toxic waste dump in Friendswood, Texas, as a departure point, the project re-presents personal stories through the dissemination of drawings, video and performance, to call attention to layers of history whose lessons are in danger of being forgotten.
BACKGROUND
27 years ago in the southeastern corner of Houston, a subdivision and elementary school were demolished after disproportionate numbers of its residents developed serious health problems. The neighborhood, called Southbend, was built next to Brio Refining, a defunct refinery and chemical waste recycling complex whose abandoned stacks and tanks loomed over the neighborhood as kids walked to and from school, splashed in the adjacent creek, and played in a nearby baseball field, without noticing it much - except for the rank odor that most excepted as part of everyday life.
In 1984 – just a few years after the first Southbend houses were built - the Brio site became listed by the EPA for Superfund remediation, after tests revealed high levels of styrene, ethylbenzene, vinyl chloride, toluene, and other toxic chemicals in the soils and groundwater there. Tank bottom sludge and chemical refinery waste had been dumped directly into unlined pits for decades. Companies deemed responsible were appointed to oversee cleanup under the guise of the “Brio Site Task Force”.
Through the 1980s and ‘90s, residents became sicker, and neighborhood children were born with birth defects. Parents (mostly mothers), championed by the local community newspaper, fought for compensation and a voice in the cleanup process. Families moved away, with or without home buyouts, and in 1997, the school and all 677 homes were razed. The task force relocated the rubble to a nearby landfill, and the Southbend acreage was eventually shaped into runoff-catching retention ponds that occupy the land today.
These ponds hold flood waters, and if the land is allowed to recover, they will continue to attract pollinating insects, migrating birds, and native grasses with deep roots that absorb toxins and improve water absorption. The ponds also hold the memories and experiences of those who once lived in their footprint - along with the infinite number of organisms and beings residing there millennia prior to any development.
THE PROJECT
I spent the bulk of 2024 researching the history of this site, collecting news stories, pouring through EPA documents and speaking to people affected by it. I’ve made several forays along the edges of the Brio’s many fences and into the retention ponds, observing what lives and grows and dies there. I’ve taken hundreds of photographs and video clips in an attempt to understand its cracked surfaces, murky waters and hidden depths, and how they these qualities bear the weight of the past. With protective gloves I picked up bits of trash: dead leaves; brittle pieces of plastic; Whattaburger takeout bags; flattened, mildewed boxes; a fragment of a discarded bible home to a brown widow and her sac of soon-to-be-baby spiders.
The detritus became paper (thoroughly cleaned in the pulping process), embedded with seeds of Texas prairie grass and flowers that I sprinkled into the pulpy water as I pulled each sheet. The paper became ink drawings based on photographs of people I’d either read about or talked to, inspired by the stories they told. And as often as I could stand the sticky summer heat, I’d venture back out into the ponds with the drawings, leaving them there, sprinkling them with more seeds, documenting them in photo/video, and thanking them before saying goodbye. They would dissolve quickly in the wind and rain, releasing the seeds.
Though few will ever see these drawings in situ, they have been carefully recorded through photographs and video. The documentation is being edited into clips that blend these images with old family photos, newspaper clippings, historic video stills and descriptions of personal experiences. The videos are being presented as part of installations featured in three exhibitions running simultaneously this fall, including River on Fire at DiverseWorks, a Texas Biennial exhibition curated by Ashley DeHoyos Sauder (September 28-November 16, 2024); Troubling the Boundaries, a Throughline exhibition featured in FotoFest’s Artist-Run/Artist-Organized, showcasing the work of collective spaces in Texas (October 5 - November 16); and Solastalgia, at San Jacinto College South Gallery, whose location across the street from the Brio site inspired this project (October 7 - December 6).
FUTURE PLANS
The Brio Memory Project is expanding to include stories from around Houston, culminating in a new exhibition at Throughline in Houston, March 2025. If you have been affected by industrial pollution in your neighborhood, you are cordially invited share your story to be featured in this next iteration.
First Day of School. Graphite, watercolor and ink on paper hand made from found ditritus. 2024
Photo by Tami Hull, South Belt-Ellington Leader, 1981.
the Brio memory project needs your stories!
Do you live or work in a Houston neighborhood contaminated by industrial pollution?
How does pollution impact your life, or the lives of those close to you?
Does its existence inform how you feel about the landscape - if so, how?
How has its presence informed your decisions or actions?
If you have a story about the effects of industrial pollution on your environment and life, you are invited to share it: plans are in the works to expand The Brio Memory Project to include stories about sites, communities and individuals across Houston. I would love to include your voice.
Just click on the story submission link above or send your story to heather@heatherLjohnson.com; image uploads are also welcome and appreciated. Please indicate if you wish your story to remain anonymous. Leave your email or sign up to receive newsletters for project updates!
FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE BRIO SUPERFUND SITE
Here are a handful among many insightful articles and resources:
Tar Wars, abbreviated version. By Marie Flickinger of the South Belt-Ellington Leader (January 19, 2019)
The Brio Memory Project is artist-funded. Contributions help offset equipment and supply costs, such as monitors, video data storage, seeds for the hand-made paper, fuel, and much more. If you’d like to support, please click the “donate” button below. With gratitude -HLJ