D i s c a r d e d V i s i o n s
Eszter Zimanyi
Look around and all the eyes can see is waste. From piles of face masks used during the COVID-19 pandemic to heaps of fake lifejackets left behind by migrants along Europe’s shores, we seem to be surrounded by discarded objects, used, abused, and left behind. As climate change accelerates and racial capitalism continues its relentless agenda of extraction and consumption, human and nonhuman life grow increasingly disposable as well.
Despite—or perhaps because of—ongoing calls for better “management,” governments seem more than willing to sacrifice the elderly, disabled, and poor in order to “save” the economy. Over the past few years, we have watched states detain migrant children in cages and abandon refugees stranded at sea. We have witnessed communities around the world endure increasingly extreme weather events while environmental regulations are dismantled by autocrats and democrats alike. Under such conditions, it seems timely to reconsider our relationship to waste once again.
Waste, materially and conceptually, is marked by a certain excess. The term ‘waste’ can signal excessive practices of extraction and production, or improper habits of consumption (wasting food, wasteful spending). It can describe an excess of the body (excrement), or the refusal or inability to make the body productive (wasted talent, waste of time, to waste away from disease or malnourishment). As a verb, ‘waste’ can also refer to excessive acts of destruction (laying to waste). Across these uses, waste seems to connote a transgression, a violation of an intended order. Considered this way, delineating waste from non-waste is always an inherently political process of decision making. It is also a deeply visual and sensory process: how something looks, smells, and feels, as well as where it exists in relation to other things, all play a role in determining its value or disposability.
Discarded Visions is a virtual exhibit curated to accompany the Fall 2022 special issue of Spectator on the theme of “waste.” The exhibit features the work of five different visual artists, each of whom takes a different approach to waste as material and conceptual matter.
Crispin Hughes’ stunning photo essay “Shroud” documents discarded wet wipes in the United Kingdom’s Thames River. These single-use cloths, which absorb the bodily fluids of their users and never fully degrade, are “at once intimate and horribly ‘other.’” In drawing an allusion between the wet wipes in the Thames and the Shroud of Oviedo–the blood-stained cloth thought to have been wrapped around the head of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion–Hughes’ project captures the unsettling, and perhaps revolting, beauty of this pollution, which intermingles the synthetic and organic, human and non-human in our life-sustaining waterways.
As an expansion to Eneos Çarka’s interview with filmmaker Jan Ijäs, which can be read within the print issue of Spectator, Ijäs generously shares color images from his remarkable documentary series titled Waste (2016-present). Waste takes viewers from Finland to Zimbabwe, New York City, Istanbul, and Lampedusa, and explores topics as wide-ranging as forced migration, extreme inflation, e-waste, and the Finnish military’s disposal of explosive weapons.
In another fascinating photo essay titled “Abandoned: Memories of Waste, 2018-2020,” Nisarg documents the deserted objects he comes across on the streets of Toronto, Canada. These items range from children’s toys to broken umbrellas, shopping carts, clothing, strollers, and even family photographs. With each new encounter, Nisarg finds himself asking: “What is it that drives us to abandon, forget, forsake, or leave personal objects in public spaces? And what happens to those forgotten/abandoned/wasted objects as they continue to exist in spite of us?”
Elizabeth (Liz) Miller offers an answer to these questions through her WasteScapes project. As a complement to her print essay in Spectator, Miller graciously shares images from some of the WasteScapes cycling tours she conducted with students in Montreal, Canada, documenting different sites that map the city through waste.
Finally, Szilvia Ruszev turns our attention to digital materiality in her provocative video essay on the “digital abject.” Through a phenomenological approach, Ruszev explores how digital practices such as glitching, morphing, and datamoshing can be used not only to distort or destroy representations of the body, but also to create “the possibility of new constellations between bodies and digital matter.” Here, technical “errors” that typically would be deleted from or repaired within moving image projects instead allow for a reappraisal of the affective relationship between the body and the digital.
Accompanying each piece is an original soundscape inspired by the exhibit and designed by multi-disciplinary artist Philip Meyer.
Together, these creative projects attune us to new ways of thinking and experiencing how we (live with) waste and offer us visions of how we might imagine, and move toward, radically different, inclusive, and sustainable futures.
Eszter Zimanyi is the 2021-2022 Postdoctoral Fellow in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California, where she received her Ph.D. in August of 2021. Her work is published or forthcoming in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS), Feminist Media Studies, Transnational Screens, Visual Anthropology, Media Fields Journal, Intermedialities, and Docalogue, among others. She is a former co-programmer of USC’s Middle East Film Screening Series and served as a consultant for The Wende Museum’s 2019 exhibit, “Watching Socialism: The Television Revolution in Eastern Europe.”
“Discarded Visions” audio copyright Philip Meyer, 2022
Web design by Taylor Crawford
This project is sponsored by the Division of Cinema and Media Studies
University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts