Waste Relations: Living with Abandoned Things

According to Bill Brown (A Sense of Things, University of Chicago Press, 2003) we glimpse thingness in irregularities of exchange or in moments when objects stop working for us. Waste is often found in these settings on the edges of order, ephemeral and phenomenal; in noticing these irregularities we are allowing waste to capture our attention. And in these chance interruptions and encounters different relations to things and ourselves emerge.  This paper uses Agnes Varda’s remarkable waste road movie The Gleaners and I to explore the relational aesthetics of waste. It focuses on the potato sequence examining how the cinematic rendering of a heart shaped potato not only brings the materiality and the beauty of the thing into play but also draws the audience into another relation with the screen. Using Eve Sedgwick’s account of texture this paper explores why the subject object distinction is not much use for thinking about the ways in which waste can make claims on us. 

Associate Professor Gay Hawkins, Media and Communications UNSW