Landscapes of Waste: What’s in a Name?: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Landfills and Dumps

Artists' Dissenting Voices

DeBris and Ukeles both interact with discarded objects and their meaning for the individual, but the trash in these instances never actually reach the landfill. In case of DeBris, she beautifies trash that people carelessly discard from their homes that land on the coastline, never making it to the landfill. DeBris would not be allowed to rummage through the detritus found at a landfill to draw inspiration for her next sculpture or fashion piece. Ukeles’s project encapsulates symbolically discarded items of meaning and showcases them to create a traceable history of the object. The inability for the public in the U.S. to interact with garbage in landfills is a stark difference to how waste is managed in emerging nations. These artists draw attention to the problem of waste as a product of mass consumption and expose these issues using innovative and participatory methods.

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