Santa Monica Airport Fuel Spill Kit
Drum overpack, 200 hazmat sorbent pads, waterproof polyethylene spill berm
Santa Monica Airport Fuel Spill Kit is a set of industrial containment tools packaged in a high-visibility drum based on protocol from the Santa Monica Airport. Designed to neutralize the threat of oil and fuel spills, these objects are ubiquitous in highly toxic work areas.
The Santa Monica Airport (SMO) was originally the site of the Douglas Aircraft Company, which manufactured military bombers during World War II. This helped bolster the rapid urban growth of the postwar economy that shaped Los Angeles today. The environmental and political residue of that history, airborne particulates, noise pollution, and mass destruction, mark the site today. Amidst the protracted battles over redevelopment and housing that have developed around the future of SMO, the spill kit stands as a placeholder to cultural anxieties about environmental disaster, but also of racial heterogeneity.
Santa Monica Airport Fuel Spill Kit draws on what Mike Davis called the “ecology of fear,” Los Angeles’s habit of living under perpetual threat, from natural disaster to social unrest to environmental collapse. The work recalls the city’s first encounters with smog in the 1940s, when an opaque haze that was so unfamiliar took over the city, and residents mistook it for the beginning of a Japanese invasion. Wartime paranoia, fueled by the actions of the Douglas Aircraft Company, formed the region's enduring atmosphere of vigilance and xenophobia. By removing a tool such as the spill kit and placing it in both a domestic and gallery context, the work uses a utilitarian object to show that California continues to orchestrate its fears of its own demise.