“Along the Mon” is an acoustic and video portrait of several interconnected sites of energy extraction, airborne emissions, and ruderal ecologies on stolen land in the Monongahela Valley and Marcellus Shale region in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

The performance was broadcast live as part of Jefferson Park Experimental: a series of live, free performances organized by Keith Helt in Chicago, IL and streamed online. The performance consisted of a live broadcast, mixing pre-recorded audio and video from sites in the Monongahela Valley and Marcellus Shale region with live sound transmitted from both the Cheswick Generating Station and U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works.

We have been meeting as an informal research group since 2019, along with another member, to understand the region through an eco-critical lens. Our research usually takes the form of field trips to various sites in the Southwestern Pennsylvania region, with its layered histories and present struggles, learning as we go about the layers of industry, ecology, and settler colonialism that are visible or made invisible. For this piece, we focused on sites of energy extraction and production, particularly related to atmospheric release. In the context of COVID-19 and the impact of national deregulatory actions on air quality within the region, airborne transmission became the framework for the per­­formance, sounds, and video.