Residue is a collaborative project by Elena Khurtova and Anika Schwarzlose, conducting a critical research into the grounds of the former weapons factory on Hembrug terrain in Zaandam. It has been home to the Netherlands’ biggest weapons factory between 1904 and 2003, which played an important role in many international conflicts, including the suppression of the independence struggles in Indonesia during the colonial wars. Currently, the area is in redevelopment in order to revive it for civilian use, but the violence that used to be exported from here has not disappeared; the soils beneath the former factory contain contaminating remnants of the weapons manufacturing. An extensive process of soil remediation tries to address this contamination. An act that represents attempts of cleansing, but can just as well be read as the covering up of an uncomfortable past.

Khurtova and Schwarzlose see the soil of the Hembrug terrain as a physical archive that tells its own story. In parallel, they investigated the photographic archive of the Hembrug factory and selected images which depict working conditions, advertisements, and technical documentation. A series of large textiles brings these two archives in contact through a photochemical process, called soil chromatography. The polluted soils reveal and transform archival images, both archives interact and collide with each other.