Myopia is a medical condition in which objects are being seen distinctly only when near to the eye. It also describes a “lack of foresight or discernment”, or narrow-mindedness.

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Myopia is a text about the visual representation of different environmental hazards and the difference in response that the human society follows when threatened by it.

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Myopia, the condition, works in this text as a metaphor for all the events that the humans decide to not see, and therefore neglect. A condition that gets more solid, the more invisible and distant these effects are. Seeing is the primary act for establishing knowledge and making sense of the environment in which we are living: what happens when human-driven environmental threats have potential catastrophic effects that are far from us in time and space and are hardly possible to represent? Where representation misses out, humans become blind, ignoring and neglecting potential violence on distant environmental bodies.

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The recent global health crisis caused by the CoVid19 pandemic will serve, in this text, as a vivid and critical example of how deeply our bodies are interconnected with the environment, and of how the representation of the invisible threat, the virus, becomes visible when projected on a familiar entity: the body. In this historical moment it became even clearer to us that we can’t define the human body as a system separate from the environment. Nevertheless, in an Era in which humans have declared themselves geological agents able to disrupt the balance of the Globe, the catastrophic consequences of the dispersion of toxins and pollutants in environmental bodies by industrial infrastructures are still being neglected. 

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The relation between body and space is the same when biological, ecological, industrial and human-driven threats are the subjects. Bringing into discourse a case study of environmental industrial pollution in Taranto, Italy, it is my interest to describe the way in which the neglected body acts as a hard copy of environmental fluxes, and renders visible not only the toxic pollutants but also the power relations of economical profit and political reward.

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Commenting on the notions of invisibility, permeability, embodiment, speed, representation and perception of risk, Myopia, the text, tries to put focus on the effects of environmental threats caused by the commodification of nature that Myopia, the condition, hides from our eyes.

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