Shortly after we moved to Hungary, an industrial accident occured in Veszprém county, western Hungary. Presumably a wet European summer had helped create and exacerbate a rupture in the waste reservoir wall of an aluminum plant. After the wall burst, one million cubic meters of caustic sludge, in the form of a brick red mud, flooded the area at half-past midnight on October 4th, 2010, coating nearby towns with a host of processing by-products, colorful but poisonous oxides, (including a calcium oxide, coincidentally, called "portlandite") which gave the slurry its painterly hue.
The featured photo above was taken by Spanish artist Palindromo Meszaros and is part of a series called "The Line". It is a striking photo and a fine visual example of those seemingly diametrically opposed concepts, beauty and disaster.
One of my favorite blogs, the techno/culture/art site Boing Boing, featured this photo on one of its recent posts. Pesticide soon picked up on the post and responded, in a way, with the following headline, which was as snarky as expected:
"Foreign Hipsters Mesmerized by Beauty of Hungarian 'Red Sludge' Disaster"
Both Pesticide and Boing Boing are two of my most read blogs, so this snide distillation of Boing Boing on the part of my belovedly Hungarian flavored Pesticide is kind of delighful. It is a privilege to admire the ironic beauty of someone else's disaster. You can be sure the people who suffered through the red sludge spill find little beauty there, even in Meszaros' cleverly aligned photographs. Other sides, once again.
Links to both articles: http://www.pestiside.hu/20120717/foreign-hipsters-mesmerized-by-beauty-of-hungarian-red-sludge-disaster/
http://boingboing.net/2012/07/11/trees-stained-by-a-toxic-spill.html
