Talking Trash

Considering Waste as Media
by Yvonne Lin

In Taiwan, where I live, hearing the familiar melody of “The Maiden’s Prayer” causes me a surge of anxiety or, much less often, a feeling of mild smugness for being prepared. Usually, I catch the sounds from a distance, giving me just enough time to grab my trash and recycling from the balcony, run down four flights of stairs, and speed walk to the block where a crowd has already gathered to wait for the arrival of three trucks: the first for garbage, the second for recycling (separated into glass, plastic, and paper), and the last for food scraps. Some neighbors chat with one another. Others stand in silence, looking at their phones or, for residents above a certain age, simply staring into space. One man stands next to a flatbed cart with towering, overstuffed stacks of the mandatory blue bags issued by the city of Taipei, collected from an apartment building with trash service. When the trucks arrive, the crowd transforms into a swarm. 

The trucks come to the stop closest to me every day around 6 p.m. except Wednesdays and Sundays, but when I miss it, which is often, I only have to walk a little farther to another stop where they swing by around 9 p.m. I’ve downloaded an app with a map of times and locations for trash disposal. Sometimes it feels like I plan my life around trash. When I’ve left trash bags smoldering on my balcony for too long, gathering flies, they serve as a rank and concrete reminder of my moral lassitude. 

On the one hand, it’s annoying, but on the other hand, perhaps it should be more normal to plan one’s life around trash. After all, we generate so much of it, and tracing trash circulation highlights circuits of global inequity. In the 2002 report “Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia” published by the Basel Action Network and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, the researchers note that the responsibility for generating e-waste tends to belong to wealthier nations and regions, such as the USA, Western Europe, Japan, Republic of Korea, and Australia. Once broken and discarded, the waste is shipped to low-income countries and regions, such as China (until it disallowed “foreign trash” in 2018), India, Brazil, and Africa. After the mass extraction of rare metals and raw materials in the Global South, environmental degradation is a form of trashing a place, on a large and existential scale.

Garbage is also a reminder of the eventual fate of all matter, encompassing the useless as well as the lifeless. In John Scanlan’s On Garbage, he writes that garbage “is concerned with ends (and thus beginnings); it is where one thing becomes another, where the once known or admitted (objects of belief or faith, markers of certainty) unfold into a mess of incompatible parts.” It resists dichotomies or classifications, but rather the “remainder of such neatness.” Thinking about garbage as a process of mediation fixes our attention on the entropic flux that all solid objects disguise. Trash is often a temporary state, which might be reappropriated into art, recuperated into the historical archive, or decomposed into chemicals, but it also threatens us with its permanence, as in nuclear waste or microplastics. Trash retains its low-class connotations, as the dregs of society are its unwanted residues, while contemporary art museums hang waste-as-bricolage on their walls, reconfigured into sculpture or captured in visual art. Proximity to garbage confers uncleanliness and impurity onto personhood, but didactic films and propaganda portray tidying not only personal trash, but everyone’s, as a self-sacrificial act of unsung heroes. Trash contains multitudes. 

In the Taiwanese novel The Man With the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-yi, a mythologized version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch crashes onto an island’s eastern coast, flooding an area with a high population of indigenous peoples. Through its fantastic reimagining of the Garbage Patch, trash becomes a means of travel across space and time, which literalizes a fundamental quality of trash metaphorics. Waste takes us back to the past at the same time that by flaunting its degradation—the present progressive of wasting away—it points towards the future.

The different sections of this syllabus probe the following questions: How do film and visual art explore or exploit the materiality of waste? How does waste produce its own means of social organization? How do films represent the lives of those who work with trash? How does the production and circulation of waste travel along global circuits? Each section opens with a generative activity intended to produce any form of creative expression to reflect on these issues. Consider them a journaling activity or an afternoon diversion that may take the form of a poem, a drawing, a song, or something else.

UNIT 1
EVERYTHING IS GARBAGE: CHAOS AND ITS KEEPERS

One sees a ragpicker knocking against the walls,
Paying no heed to the spies of the cops, his thralls,
But stumbling like a poet lost in dreams;
He pours his heart out in stupendous schemes.

—Baudelaire, “The Ragpickers’ Wine” 

Prompt

How does the “jumbled vomit,” to quote Baudelaire, of your city (town, village, unincorporated community…) reflect your place of residence? Seek out puddles, mirrors, windows, screens, which do not merely represent, but rather mediate the trash-filled world, inflecting its meaning with its own materiality? How might these contain, distort, mitigate, or magnify the chaotic overflow of debris and detritus produced from the everyday habits of living? How does the world look, or smell, or feel refracted through trash? How do you see your community differently through this lens? 

VIEW: 

  • Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, Agnès Varda, 2000)
  • Lixo Extraordinário (Waste Land, Lucy Walker, 2010)
  • 垃圾的村子 (Trash Village, Zou Xueping, 2012) 
  • “The People Who Live on Neihu Garbage Mountain” (Renjian magazine, 1985)

READ: 

UNIT 2
GARBAGE IS EVERYTHING: TRASH, ARCHIVE, AND ART

Prompt

Live as a gleaner for a day: you may not spend any money. Instead, look around at the trash, or soon-to-be trash, you have at hand to consume and rework. Then, imagine a diorama about your day—taking inspiration from, say, a moment, a scene, an emotion, or an atmosphere—using only what you already own or what you can glean. You might imagine a 19th-century diorama, canvases placed in a rotating auditorium, or a shoebox diorama that you might have made for a school project. You might create it or depict it, in images or words. Consider where these items came from and consider their decay and afterlives: how are they reborn? 

VIEW: 

  • Thomas Sauvin, Beijing Silvermine, 2009–present
  • The Diary of Lu Ji-Ying, 1933–2004
  • Xu Bing, Phoenix Project, 2008–2016
  • Mithu Sen, MOU (Museum of Unbelongings), 2011-2018

READ: 

  • Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash by Gillian Whitely (2010)
  • “The Ragpickers” from On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China by Margaret Hillenbrand (2023) 
  • “Plastic” from Mythologies by Roland Barthes (1957)
  • “Again, again” by Rachel Meade Smith (Syllabus Project)

UNIT 3
WASTE-LANDS: TRASH CARTOGRAPHIES

Prompt

Go on a walk, one of your regular routes. It is now a trash walk. Bring along a printout of a Google map of your route, and draw small grids over it. Take note of the placement, or paucity, of trash cans. Lightly shade in the grids where you notice trash cans. Is there recycling or compost? Draw a star in those grids. Are they overflowing? Darken the grids. Darken, also, the grids where there are dumpsters and write down what types of buildings are around them. Where do you see litter or fecal matter lining the streets? Draw a diagonal line through the grids. Consider the collision of their histories threaded through you: how are they remapped? What form do they take?

VIEW:

READ:

UNIT 4
THE SOCIAL ORDER OF TRASH

Prompt

Who told you to clean your room as a child, if anyone? Who took out the trash? How might you analyze the labor of keeping entropy at bay through the frameworks of gender, class, family history, (dis)ability, or culture? What types of moral values were assigned to cleanliness or lack thereof? How has this changed as you’ve gotten older? How is trash managed at the municipal level? Plot the landfills and dumpsters near where you live on a map service, maybe Google maps. What neighborhoods are they in? What are their reputations? What patterns do you identify?

VIEW: 

  • 少女的祈禱 (Pray for Love, Liu Jiachang, 1975) 
  • 塑料王國 (Plastic China, Wang Jiuliang, 2016)
  • Un Dessert pour Constance (Dessert for Constance, Sarah Maldoror, 1981) 
  • SUNO (सुनो) by Kanchan Joneja, Mayank Joneja, Depanshu Gola and Sukriti Thukral (2022) [go directly to digital soundscape here]

READ: 

  • The Waste Makers by Vance Packard (1960)
  • Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value by Michael Thompson (1979)
  • Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (Susan Strasser, 2000)
  • “The Nazi rag-pickers and their wine: the politics of waste and recycling in Nazi Germany” by Anne Berg (Social History, 2015)
  • “Urban Transformations: In Pune, India, Waste Pickers Go from Trash to Treasure” by Sarah Parsons, Anne Maassen and Madeleine Galvin (World Resources Institute)

UNIT 5
E-WASTE FOREVER

Close-up of a photograph from Xing Danwen’s disCONNEXION, 2003-2005.

Prompt

Write down all the electronic devices, which you may interpret as you wish, you have used over your lifetime. Make a table and write one into each box. The order could be chronological or more associative. In each grid, jot down a few adjectives or phrases you associate with each item. What narrative unfolds from this mapping? Where are these objects now?  

VIEW:

  • Xing Danwen, DisCONNEXION, 2003–2005 
  • Benjamin Gaulin, “Media Archaeology” (from Recyclism)
  • Qubais Reed Ghazala, “circuit-bending” instruments

READ: 

  • Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade (2007)
  • Greening the Media by Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller (2012)
  • “Electronic Waste in Guiyu: A City under Change?” by Davor Mujezinovic (2019)
  • Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music by Kyle Devine (2019)
  • Trash Metaphors by Nika Simovich Fisher (Dirt)

Talking Trash references two other syllabi: On Collecting (Kind Of) by Elizabeth Goodspeed and Again, again by Rachel Meade Smith.