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

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

 
Postmodern discourse (Allen, Engler, Hawkins) relating to the Western world’s obsession with hygiene, cleanliness and the obfuscation of over-consumption and excessive waste expose early sanitation processes of modernity dating back the 18th century. This project will take a multimedia approach to highlighting the current situation of landfills and dumps in the urban space. By utilizing the content management system entitled Scalar, this project will draw comparisons and highlight differences between the developing world and Western practices relating to landfills, specifically the shift from utopia to dystopia. This project will contrast the documentaries and films Ilha das flores (1980), Estamira (2004), Waste Land (2010), and the Landfill Harmonic (2015), with the documentaries Garbage Mountain Megastructures by National Geographic (2006) and The Fresh Kills Story: From World's Largest Garbage Dump to a World-Class Park (2012), as well as documentation from visits to a Los Angeles area landfill in order to trace practices in the emergent and Western worlds and discuss their implications.
 

Contents of this path: