Laid Waste: Dead Matter, New Landscapes, and the Politics of Trash

Contemporary analysis of global warming and “green” conservation confront us with the environmental and political implications of the use and abuse of resources. This panel articulates a trash aesthetic founded in the subversive, generative potential of entropic systems. The phenomena of over-consumption and technological obsolescence and its opposite, the conservation and recycling of resources, suggest the need for new models of self and community and their relationship to matter, space and place. Speakers build a new ontology of trash from the bricolage of collective and personal histories, simulated landscapes, and repurposed waste. Each approach entails new theoretical models that subvert capitalism through abject, atomized forms. Patterns of obsolescence and decay also demand redefinitions of embodiment, the life cycle, and what it means to be human