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On the social construction of trash
If you place attention on something, does it stop being trash? Is there waste only where there's no attention?
This seminar takes that question and gets our hands dirty with it. Drawing on geographer Vinay Gidwani's work on India's "waste-value dialectic," alongside artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles's Maintenance Artist and its insistence that unseen labor deserves witness, we'll build our own practice of sustained, unglamorous noticing. Students will keep a waste log, transform a piece of their own discarded material by hand into dye, into stock, and into structure. We'll close the course with a group exhibition built entirely from what got reclaimed.
The seminar also draws on fieldwork from Bangalore's construction-waste economy (Baka, Doherty, Butt) and returns often to Dante, whose Inferno remains one of literature's oldest arguments that waste is a location, not a substance. We will ask: is there really an “away” to throw things to? By the end, we will have a richer, more flexible and personal relationship to what we discard.
Led by Shivani Lakshmi Aysola, founding principal of Shamba-la Studios and author of Dialectics of Debris, a study of Bangalore's construction waste landscape.
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
September 22-October 6
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo by Kai Pro
On the social construction of trash
If you place attention on something, does it stop being trash? Is there waste only where there's no attention?
This seminar takes that question and gets our hands dirty with it. Drawing on geographer Vinay Gidwani's work on India's "waste-value dialectic," alongside artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles's Maintenance Artist and its insistence that unseen labor deserves witness, we'll build our own practice of sustained, unglamorous noticing. Students will keep a waste log, transform a piece of their own discarded material by hand into dye, into stock, and into structure. We'll close the course with a group exhibition built entirely from what got reclaimed.
The seminar also draws on fieldwork from Bangalore's construction-waste economy (Baka, Doherty, Butt) and returns often to Dante, whose Inferno remains one of literature's oldest arguments that waste is a location, not a substance. We will ask: is there really an “away” to throw things to? By the end, we will have a richer, more flexible and personal relationship to what we discard.
Led by Shivani Lakshmi Aysola, founding principal of Shamba-la Studios and author of Dialectics of Debris, a study of Bangalore's construction waste landscape.
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
September 22-October 6
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo by Kai Pro