Lukas Marxt Lets the Toxins Speak

The Salton Sea is shrinking. As its surface recedes, the exposed lakebed releases plumes of toxic dust, laden with arsenic, selenium, and agricultural pesticide residues, that drift into the lungs of surrounding communities—predominantly low-income Latino and Indigenous populations in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys. Rates of childhood asthma here are among the highest in California.

This is an ongoing crisis, a slow violence whose perpetrators remain diffuse and whose victims remain largely invisible. It is within this context that Lukas Marxt’s experimental documentary, Among The Palms The Bomb, or: Looking for Reflections in the Toxic Field of Plenty (2024), assumes its urgency.

A film that engages the multi-layered histories of land, lake water, and toxicity must itself be stratified. It must navigate multiple spatio-temporal scales without losing its orientation. And it must attune to the mediation of what are, in essence, invisible, elemental specters—the remnants and ghosts of history.

In Among the Palms the Bomb, Lukas Marxt surveys the landscape of the Salton Sea to excavate layered histories of toxicity. Through embodied observation and media-archaeological methods, the film probes the region’s historical and geographical strata and distills the violence sedimented in the land.

The region’s toxins are residues of multiple human interventions. Bomb tests and other military maneuvers from World War II through the Cold War and into the present day have produced chemical pollutants, concentrated in the water or buried in shallow soils, that have devastated the ecosystem and, carried by windborne dust, extended their reach to distant human settlements. At the same time, agricultural development on these Indigenous lands have depleted its freshwater and salinized the soil, exacerbating the situation.

The practices of militarism and industrial agriculture are entangled with nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism, even as they, in turn, shape the very forms those structures take. Toxicity becomes not merely a narrative thread, but a persistent and lethal presence.

Witnessing Toxicity

Lukas Marxt wrestles with a central question: How can one mediate a toxicity that is spectral—difficult to apprehend, yet ever-present and materially destructive?

Marxt gives the specter of toxins a recurring, physical form: a blurred-faced soldier who alternates between drilling and watching. The soldier becomes a cipher for the otherwise hidden histories of violence and contamination.

Media can help render the invisible perceptible. Perceptibility and intelligibility, however, unfold in generative ways. Karen Barad describes the vitality within such an assemblage as “intra-action.” Unlike “interaction”—which describes when pre-constituted entities meet, “intra-action” insists instead that agencies emerge only through their mutual entanglement. Barad would resist the vocabulary of mediation precisely because it assumes two preexisting, stable relata. Yet for this very reason, her framework sharpens the question Marxt faces. If toxicity, landscape, and recording apparatus do not preexist their encounter but co-constitute one another, then the camera cannot simply witness what is already there; it participates in bringing the perceptible into being.

As the preeminent technology of witnessing, the camera is a uniquely privileged medium, combining the material-causal force of indexicality with perceptually verifiable visual accuracy. This privilege constitutes a powerful claim to objective truth. It offers what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have termed “mechanical objectivity,” an aspiration that arose in the mid-nineteenth century of “knowledge that bears no trace of the knower.”

For an apparatus to record without a trace of a knowing subject, observers must practice “willed will-less-ness,” a paradox whereby they must actively suppress subjective intervention. Yet, the result must still be visually legible. Automated photography (and cinema) achieves this by both suppressing the observer’s subjective projections, theoretical biases, and aesthetic preferences, while simultaneously securing the image’s self-evident reception.

Alongside the camera, however, Marxt mobilizes instruments such as metal detectors, sonar, drills, and total stations. In doing so, he shows a profound hesitation toward the camera’s power to witness—for good reason.

Sight alone provides a merely superficial truthfulness. An index is the causal imprint that the world leaves upon a recording surface. It is an instance of matter inscribing itself—what we might call matter’s own enunciation. To attune to matter’s own enunciation, we cannot solely rely on sight and visuality. We must consider: When vision itself is untrustworthy or powerless, what other material witnesses can we rely on to understand toxicity and, in turn, to support political accountability?

Embodied Mediations

In one extended sequence of Among the Palms the Bomb, bomb fragments are excavated with the aid of non-visual technologies. At times, these techniques mobilize senses beyond sight. More often, though, they rely on a synthesis with more subtle, embodied perceptions.

In one extended sequence, Marxt follows a local metal hunter as they survey bomb fragments buried beneath the desert surface. The handheld camera trembles unsteadily; the breathing of both the cinematographer and the excavator bleeds into the soundtrack, indistinguishable from one another. A metal detector emits its staccato signal centimeters above the uneven terrain, its pitch rising until, at the moment of greatest intensity, the hunter drops to one knee and begins to dig through the loose sand with bare hands. Minutes later, he retrieves a metal fragment—one that, without contextual framing, we could never identify as a residue of bomb testing. Between these shaky, imperfect shots, the spectral figure of the soldier appears at a distance, standing watch: a cipher for the violence of military-industrial and colonial regimes, whose presence infuses the scene with a latent sense of the uncanny and the threatening.

What is striking here is not merely the content of the discovery but the sensory architecture of the sequence itself. Non-visual technologies do not simply supplement the camera’s gaze but displace it. The excavation is guided not by sight but by a synthesis of sonic feedback, haptic intuition, and embodied labor. The juxtaposition of these scenes and a tight montage reveal how the presence of the observer—their labor, sweat, and breath—is inseparably intertwined with the mediating power of these technologies. It is impossible to overstate this intimacy, nor its effect.

These technological interventions, deployed across contexts, negotiate submerged histories and deadly substances with a pronounced awareness. Drilling becomes less an extractive gesture than an invitation. It is a way to produce knowledge with the landscape, not simply extract it from the ground.

Yet if these sequences foreground the intimacy between body and instrument, Marxt elsewhere complicates this very intimacy by staging its contradictions. His critical engagement with media technologies also provokes reflection on (dis)embodiment. His artistic choices sometimes appear contradictory or uncanny.

In one scene, a gimbal erases the trace of the handheld camera, while the sound of footsteps is amplified. The human’s presence in the frame is both erased and exaggerated. This strategy can only be understood through our (impossible) pursuit of objective truth on the one hand, and the capacity to discover truth through the intimacy between embodied labor and media technology on the other.

This scene later sharply illustrates the presence-absence, intimate-mediated paradox. In the rented ballroom of a local museum, where wartime, popular music loops endlessly and atomic bomb replicas are absurdly displayed, the artist dances with the camera hoisted on his shoulder. This is satire of nationalism and military ardor; Marxt playfully presents the Cold War obsessions of soldiers and military buffs. But this scene also foregrounds the porosity between human and medium. What the camera records is not a pre-given objective reality, but one produced—and made perceptible to us—only by and through Marxt’s physical manipulation of and bodily participation in the apparatus.

To some degree, Among the Palms the Bomb suggests that the human–media–landscape nexus is a continuum, entangled and indivisible across scales. It is precisely by embodying this entanglement that we apprehend the film’s audiovisual elements as situated knowledge, rather than as irrefutable objectivity.

The Toxicity of Knowability

Marxt treats toxicity as a spatio-temporal residue or spectral element. However, his conceptualization collapses it into the legacies of human violence—war, nationalist fervor, internal colonialism, or capitalism—rather than assessing it on its own terms, as a reality traversing bodies, environments, and temporalities. The problem persists: How do toxins, landscapes, or matter more broadly speak for themselves?

This limitation brings us to another, thornier passage in which ghostly matter is conjured through complex, technical mediation. On a windless lake, a local guide invites Marxt to board a small motorboat retrofitted with a quasi-military sonar to probe the lake’s unfathomable depths. The guide—almost obsessively—believes that this former nuclear testing ground must still have active missiles hidden beneath the placid surface.

Soon, the sonar appears to register something. Though lacking visual legibility, the guide cannot hide his excitement: They may indeed have found it. Yet, could it be a wrecked boat, a massive boulder, or something else entirely? The audience never finds out.

Marxt deliberately preserves the guide’s near-paranoid, forensic desire, sharpening the tension between a human will-to-know and the unknowability of nonhuman things. Technical mediation does not collapse here, but neither does it secure truth; it induces interpretive pressure. The sense of unease the scene elicits becomes oppressive against the guide’s excitement.

In this scene in particular, the film presents an uncomfortable question: Can we pursue accountability without succumbing to the same instrumentalizing gaze that rendered the land disposable?

This intractable question lies beyond the remit of any single film. Among the Palms the Bomb, though, tentatively explores how projects of witnessing (including via film itself) appear oriented toward undoing the very need for mediation.

The Labor of Landscape Attunement

In several sequences lacking explicit contextual grounding, Among the Palms the Bomb presents exaggerated close-ups of polluted river segments, where swarms of insects and their remains—some intact, others dismembered—writhe within a viscous substance. As the camera slowly drifts, the thickened water seems to congeal. Crucially, no voiceover accompanies these images.

As the narrator’s voice quietly withdraws from the scene, the audience is left without the hermeneutic scaffolding that might translate this scene into legible meaning. We are not told what we are seeing; we are not offered a thesis, an explanation, or a call to action. The film simply holds the frame and, in doing so, suspends the epistemological sovereignty we have come to expect from documentaries.

In this suspension, a question arises: “Is there toxicity here?” The landscape is interrogating us rather than vice versa.

The bodies of dying insects register what our eyes cannot detect. Though toxicity appears invisible, even immaterial, it pierces our imaginaries with an uncanny sharpness because it has insisted on being felt, on cutting through both the limits of representation and the thresholds of our own psyche. Here, the film shifts from representation and toward attunement. Rather than how to render the invisible visible, it asks how nonhuman entities and active materials insist on being sensed—how toxicity articulates its presence by compelling our attunement.

Attunement, being in harmonious sync with another’s internal state, requires labor. It dwells within the interstices between human and nonhuman perceptibility, a way of coexisting with what resists representation, a patient readiness to wait for things to reveal themselves.

Among the Palms the Bomb gestures toward attunement, particularly in the opening sequences, where extended landscape shots linger after human actors exit the frame. In those moments, matter itself seems to stir, albeit on scales of time and space beyond human comprehension.

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Featured image: In this still from Among the Palms the Bomb (2024), “Wendover Will” welcomes travelers to West Wendover, home of the atomic bombs that were tested in the Salton Sea.

Juntao Yang is a scholar, critic, and artist based in Brooklyn, and an incoming Ph.D. student at University of California, Berkeley. Yang holds an M.A. from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and a B.A. from Wuhan University. Yang’s critical writings and artistic practices examine the operations of micro-power in visual and material culture, exploring the invisible conflicts of daily existence and the fluid mechanics of power dynamics. Contact.