Toxic Dust - A Field Guide to Ostrava's Altered Landscapes

Toxic Dust is an artistic survey that investigates Ostrava’s post-mining landscapes—terrains continuously reshaped not only by more than a century of extraction, but also by the complex processes of abandonment and natural reclamation that have occurred over the decades since. It offers a poetic tool for navigating these altered landscapes and proposes an alternative approach: one that does not reduce them to a single narrative of decay, but instead attends to their current conditions, their ongoing transformations, and their entanglement with human and other-than-human processes.

Published by PLATO, city gallery of contemporary art within the platform Octopus Press
as an outcome of the residency project Read Garden, Read Ostrava.

© 2025 Rosario Talevi, with contributions by Jan Lenart. All rights reserved.

Artistic research, text, illustrations: Rosario Talevi
Curator: Edith Jeřábková
Geomorphological research and fieldwork: Jan Lenart
Photography: Julian Irlinger
Copy-editing: Lorna McDowell, Milena Tučná
Translation to Czech: Marta Darom
Production: Lucia Devečková, Kristýna Gajdošová, Michaela Ondroušková, Pavlína Spurná
Graphic design: Sebastián Garbrecht - Persona Studio, persona-studio.xyz
Printed in Brno, Quatro print, a.s.
Typefaces: Plato, Freight Text, Prestige Elite 07
Paper: Arctic Volume White Naturweiss FS
Edition of 150 pieces