The Contours of Waste and its Remainders in 7 Days of Garbage

Zusammenfassung

The photography series 7 Days of Garbage advances a concern for individual and household accumulations of waste. It attempts to prompt us to rethink our relationships with waste. Through its visual techniques and aesthetic framing of waste and its subjects, the artwork represents the excesses of the Western consumer. The series captures accumulation and particular spatial and temporal orderings of everyday things that would make us classify them as waste. The photographs enable a sense of spectatorship and distance from the scenes, and yet at the same time, work to produce familiarity and self-surveillance. This chapter argues that this aestheticticisation of waste leaves its own residue and remainders. Beyond the individual and household, it leaves out broader networks and economies at play, as well as our affective and sensory entanglements with waste. This chapter calls for us to go beyond the frame of the image and to shift our analytical attention to the ways in which waste is not seen, not felt, and not represented, and the larger economies at play. In doing so, it argues that we can then begin to understand the ways in which framings of waste have consequences for how we encounter material objects, others, and ourselves.