Working With Waste

September 19th 2023 Co-hosted by Guest Prof. Lucy Beech, the Institute for Artistic Research at Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF and The Filmuni Summer School, supported by ZEM.

This event brought together a group of artists, facilitators, social scientists, environmental historians, students, filmmakers and writers that share an interest in the politics, processes and socio-cultural implications of working with waste. 

Moderators: Lucy Beech  and Tamar Novick | Speakers: Simon Werrett | Elsa Richardson | Mary Maggic | Paulin Curnier Jardin | Alex Balnchette | Tamar Novick

MORNING SESSION

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Thrifty Science

a Lecture by Simon Werrett (History of Science)

If the twentieth century saw the rise of “Big Science,” then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift. As Simon Werrett’s new history shows, frugal early modern experimenters transformed their homes into laboratories as they recycled, repurposed, repaired, and reused their material possessions to learn about the natural world. Thrifty Science explores this distinctive culture of experiment and demonstrates how the values of the household helped to shape an array of experimental inquiries, ranging from esoteric investigations of glowworms and sour beer to famous experiments such as Benjamin Franklin’s use of a kite to show lightning was electrical and Isaac Newton’s investigations of color using prisms. Tracing the diverse ways that people put their material possessions into the service of experiment, Werrett offers a history of practices of recycling and repurposing that are often assumed to be more recent in origin. Could thrifty science be making a comeback today, as scientists grapple with the need to make their research more environmentally sustainable?

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The Emotional Stomach

Research Workshop led by Elsa Richardson (History of Emotions)

As a contributor to Working with Waste, Elsa will read from and discuss portions of her forthcoming book, Stomach Rumbles, and deliver a workshop on the cultural life of digestion using historical materials from the fourteenth century to the present day

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AFTERNOON SESSION

We Are Living in Estroworld Urine

Hormone extraction demonstration by Mary Maggic 

How do bodies queer at the molecular level? How is this queering inextricably tied to industrial capitalism? Combining body and gender politics and environmental toxicity, we begin to unpack the concept of “open source estrogen,” the underlying premise that hormonal molecules are ubiquitously all around us - available for us to hack, mutate, and become-with. Through this process of unboxing their molecular mystique, we see that even in our sublime sea of toxic molecules, it is still a sea of co-mattering. With our extractive tools we can see only the tiniest picture in the macro cosmos of space and time. But perhaps this is all we need to transmute the traumas of our old world into the new.

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Tout est bon dans le cochon (Nothing is wasted with the pig)

Artist talk and film screening of Fat To Ashes 2021 with Pauline Curnier Jardin

Meat, skin, wax, confetti, blood, intestines, odours, senses, smoke, ritual, alcohol, excess, touch, singing, fat and ashes: these are some of the soft, rough, gentle, and coarse materials artist Pauline Curnier Jardin employs in her works. Her cinematic and installational language often adopts myth-like narratives, which she deconstructs and disrupts. Fat to Ashes combines three cinematic snapshots: a religious festival in honour of Saint Agatha; the slaughter of a pig; and the Cologne Carnival. Thereby the film title denotes the week of excess that runs from so-called “Fat Thursday” or “Giovedi grasso” and known as “Weiberfastnacht” or “Fettdonnerstag” in German, until Ash Wednesday, which marks the day reality sets back in and Lent begins according to the Christian Calendar. Jardin shows these three spheres of activity as places of transgression and transformation which bring societal functions originating in cult rituals into the present: those of congregating together, performative display, and the exuberant abandonment of prevailing mores.

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EVENING SESSION

The Compulsive, Never-Ending Uses of Pigs: A Talk on Cat Food, Value, and Wasted Life

Lecture Alex Blanchette (Environmental Anthropology)

The lecture is followed by a conversation with Pauline Curnier Jardin and Dr Alex Blanchette moderated by Dr Tamar Novick.