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exhibit waste discard studies re:materia

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One woman’s trash

When the re:materia exhi’pit was set up at the ECCE studio at KPU in Surrey in May of 2024, I breathed a sigh of relief: the labour of moving the multiple pieces across the stuffy room overheated by the summer sun was now over! The curated waste was carefully and intentionally placed around the studio, poised for enacting the project’s intentions of creative and critical reimagining of pedagogical and curricular possibilities of waste. The sculptural object of twisted green plastic strands “growing” from discarded soil framed the land acknowledgment, reminding of the impossibility of recognizing the Indigenous Land relations while remaining abstracted from the settler-colonial apparatus implicated in their theft and poisoning. The children’s artwork and pedagogical documentation that were scheduled for waste and recycling bins but were instead gathered and offered to the exhi’pit by Rachel Phillips, ECPN pedagogist, were scattered on the approach to the wire sculpture. More pieces of waste and crumbled notes framed the metal piece, asking to be weaved into the collective story we’ve been composing. With the installation task completed, I happily left for my summer vacation.

When I returned to the studio two weeks later to open the exhibit, I discovered what I, in hindsight, should have seen coming. In the two weeks of my absence, the maintenance team tidied up the entire space: the discarded artwork, the scattered documentation, the broken flowerpot with contaminated soil, the long loose pieces of plastic – all were cleared out of the studio. The trash bags with crumbled up work from past projects and various donated pieces of waste which I “artfully” placed around the room were also removed, replaced with new empty garbage bags. Desperately, I searched the nearby public garbage bins, but to no avail: about a third of the exhibit was now “gone”.

This event, however practically devastating, was one of the most generative for me. While the exhi’pit was designed as a participatory artistic installation space, drawing on the actualization power of visitors doing the performance (Vannini, 2015) – moving through the panels, reading, writing, sketching, touching, shifting, weaving, cringing, stopping, speaking, listening – it somehow became in my mind a piece of abstracted research. Yes, hopeful in its power of activating and provoking thought and pedagogical action, but also exclusionary in the very notion of curating waste. In the zeal of arranging the exhibition space, my focus narrowed on the materiality of trash (which I do indeed find captivating) to such an extend, that I lost the view of the wider apparatus of waste/ing. It took the loss of a large part of the exhibit to the regular maintenance work to remind me that the waste work cannot be done at a distance from those who live it and do it. The intention of the re:materia exhi’pit was not (only) to be intimate with (particular) waste, but to bring into early childhood education the central question of discard studies: “What must be discarded for this or that system to be created and to carry on?” (Liboiron & Lepawsky, 2022, p. 3) because “it is systems that allow some things to make sense, some things to seem valuable or worth saving, and some things to seem natural or inevitable instead of others” (ibid., p. 28; emphasis added). To be sure, I see the entry of the cleanup crew into the re:materia performance space not as the moving of the artistic work into the “real” world, but as part of waste assemblages, of which re:materia can offer only a small, situated and partial view. Both the maintenance workers and I are carrying out affective and embodied laboring as we are simultaneously supporting and interfering with the systems of waste/ing.

Of course, the experience of waste is very different depending on where one is situated. While my job was to purposely select and gather particular waste, it is the job of others (in this case and often in life unseen others) to remove it. It will be the life of those living downstream from the toxicity of waste disposal to sort, burn, bury, breathe, drink, and otherwise consume waste. The others will include human and more-than-human others. The others will include futures we are co-constructing with perhaps the very same young children whose drawings were discarded here in the first place. I believe it’s same realizations of deep implications and uneven waste experiences that brought one of the participants to leave a written note above a trash can outside the exhibit asking whether this was “just” garbage or also part of the exhibit, and another person to note, in paralyzing realization, that they were walking through the space with a disposable coffee cup in their hand: what do I do now?

Theoretical musings aside, I still had the job of restoring the missing pieces of the exhi’pit. No surprises here: I easily found more waste materials. Afterall, in 2018, World Bank estimates put annual waste production at 2.01 billion tons and expected to increase to 3.4 billion tons by 2050 (Kaza et al., 2018). For the remainder of the exhi’pit’s time at KPU, I leave the studio every day placing a series of “this is an exhibit” and “please do not remove” notes at the door, to safeguard the waste.

I share my small story not as a confession or epiphany (though the moment I saw the cleaned studio jostled me well and truly out of my artistic reverie), but rather as another example of defamiliarization that we must continue to do (and that discard study experts themselves have to do, or so Liboiron and Lepawsky (2022) tell us) in questioning the easy solutions venerating the 3Rs and making us believe we can remain removed from the planetary consequences of the waste accumulation.

More information:

The re:materia program, a partnership between ECPN and ECEBC, engages early childhood educators in creatively and critically reimagining pedagogical processes and curriculum-making around waste.

The re:materia exhi’pit is a participatory artistic installation and exhibition space that was launched at the Early Childhood Educators of BC (ECEBC) Conference in May of 2024 as an invitation for early childhood educators and their allies across the province of BC to take up the difficult labour of disrupting the capitalist citizenship that supports the extractive cycle of consumption and waste production. The exhi’pit was curated by Tatiana Zakharova-Goodman, atelierista and instructor at Capilano University’s School of Education and Childhood Studies, in close collaboration with the re:materia program’s scholars, pedagogists, educators and administrators, including: Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Emily Gawlick, Tracy Barkman, Tanya Makasoff, Rachel Phillips, Denise Hodgins, Teresa Smith, Sue Irwin, Kathleen Kummen, Melanie Walters and Kerry Watts. The project was inspired, in part, by the Remida cultural project on sustainability, creativity and research on waste materials in Reggio Emilia, Italy.

Listen to Tatiana narrate this blog here