The City as Landfill

The second <RARE EARTH> <MATERIAL ACTS> workshop will be held on 3 December 2024.

In this workshop, Ignacio Polo will facilitate the dialogue “The City as Landfill”, a hands-on introduction to the study of discard and reject in the city of Amsterdam.

We will dive into the metabolic processes behind the city of conspicuous consumption and hidden-in-plain-sight trash. During the workshop we will come into contact with discarded artifacts, “getting our hands dirty” in order to engage in their analysis, including identifying evidence of planned obsolescence in design features. In this workshop, we will try to gain an understanding of the mechanisms and multi-scalar processes that shape our waste. We will discuss how authorities and corporate elites (mis-)manage it and how they promote, sometimes unintentionally, the production of more of it.

With Christmas shopping sprees looming in the background, the session is designed as a dialogue to reflect on our relationship to waste in the city, and to share experiences and ideas in connection to relevant themes and methodologies in the study of refuse. We continue to apply the Radical Observation practice in a new urban setting as a means to help re-train our gaze and re-frame perceptions away from consumer-based norms. The workshop is intended as a test-bed during which we experiment with material acts of reciprocity and care for ourselves and the environment in which we live.

The date chosen, two days before the gift-giving feast of Sinterklaas, is deliberate. Participants are invited to reuse found objects as gifts or to create critical artworks, for instance, in the form of traditional wrappings used in Sinterklaas celebrations, the so-called “surprises”.

When & where

Tuesday, 3 December 2024 from 3 PM to 7 PM

Het Afvalpaleis,
Dapperstraat 82,
Amsterdam-Oost on

Note: The workshop functions as a complement to the WASTE2ENERGY visit to the private waste processing company of Amsterdam (AEB), put together under the governance research cluster of UP. During The City as Landfill, we will have a chance to brainstorm relevant questions that may come up during the visit to the AEB.

Contact Ignacio Polo at i.polosainz@uva.nl for further information.