Disquiet Fragrance

Our seas are dying from almost 76 years of global dumping of munitions originating from the Second World War in our waters. After the war, scientists failed to destroy the massive arsenals of chemical weapons. In the end, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States dumped chemical weapons directly into the seabed. Troops filled entire ships with metric tons of chemical munitions and encased them in bombs or artillery shells, sometimes poured into barrels or other containers and then they shoved the containers overboard or scuttled the vessels at sea, leaving spotty or inexact records of the placements and amounts dumped. In 2017, a group of researchers from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, calculated that the total amount of chemical munitions quietly lying on the marine ground reached approximately 1.6 million tons. That number solely consists of the weapons in known locations which they believe is only 40 to 50 percent of the total number of sites.

Based on such circumstance, ‘Disquiet Fragrance’ constructs a fictitious correspondence that threads the research-led ethereal imageries accompanied by the historical shreds of evidence from the Second World War to envision the severeness of the munitions which contaminate the marine environment with adamsite, chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas and parallelly damage our terrestrial systems and groundwater as well.