Over the last century, the idea of progress and industrial capitalism have created a climate emergency through the violent extraction of natural resources. This research focuses on lithium mineral extraction taking place in Portugal and the consequences that these activities have for the environment and local communities. Drawing from Robert Smithson’s notion of ‘ruins-in-reverse’ and ‘abstract geology’, the research takes an interdisciplinary approach by combining geological, archaeological and forensic methods with the act of walking, site writing, object analysis and experimental practice to explore the area where fiction, imagination, and reality blur to reconstruct events through the geological layer and traces left by industrial development in places under extractive colonialism and popular resistance, economic dispute and ecological crisis. The research investigates the relation between waste and spatial justice within the contemporary context of globalisation. Working in sculpture, photography, and public art works, the practice explores the creative and subversive potential of waste to question the intersections between extractive capitalism, colonialism, the Anthropocene, and the climate crisis. Here I suggest that the ways we perceive and relate to waste are informed by the unjust geographies created by colonial legacies that are still present in the city order. The practice also includes the case study ‘Kverndalen in New Light’, in which I concentrate on methods, practices, and possibilities to reinscribe waste with meaning and value in order to propose speculative alternatives for urban regeneration projects in an effort towards material and spatial reconstitution. The practice research draws from a range of theoretical perspectives and scholarly work to enable a conversation between different approaches to waste, unfolding the scope of their research, methodology and knowledge gaps. This travels from Michel de Certeau’s work (1998) on the relationship between objects, memory and forgetting to explore alternative material forms of remembrance that acknowledges the ‘transience’ of power in the process of ruination (Desilvey, 2017), “waste as ‘matter out of place’” (Douglas, 1966), Waste as ‘matter out of time’” (Viney, 2014; Allon, Barcan & Edison-Cogan, 2021; Foucault’s notion of “heterotopias” as ‘spaces of otherness’, Guttormsen’s ‘deep cities’ framework, 2020), “waste value” (Thompson, 2017), and the use of ‘ruin waste’ (Edensor, 2005; DeSilvey, 2017) as an agent for ‘radical change’ (Franklin & Till, 2018); and Hawkins’s ‘waste as thing’ (2018). The research looks at political ecology, decolonial theory, and urban humanities (Bruna’s ‘green extractivism’ (2022); Yusoff’s ‘white geology’ (2018); Vergés ‘racial Capitalocene’ (2019); Cuff’s “immanent speculation practice” (2020); Soja’s “spatial justice” (2010); and Rendell’s ‘critical spatial practice’ (2002). It also looks at contemporary artistic practices, specifically at Robert Smithson’s work on entropy and Susan Schuppli’s notion of ‘material witness’. Ultimately, I argue that waste can be understood as an alternative material form with value that has the potential to inspire social change and enable a more sustainable and inclusive ecological future. The research aims, therefore, to address and redefine the role of the artist in the urban policy-making of cities under transformation and industrial development.

Funder: Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Portugal [2022.14032.BD]