Waste in Place: A Response to ‘Re-imagining British Waste Landscapes’

If we take ‘landscape’ with its root meaning of a ‘worked land’ and later as a genre of artistic representation, then we could say that it is ‘the embodiment of a developmental or historical process’ in which human activity defines what in a landscape is waste or of value and what is not. However, this definition of landscape does not account for place as an environment of co-existing and affective material energies both human and non-human, organic and non-organic. As human modes of inhabitation of a place introduce, deposit or displace materials and these decay, erode or disappear, so landscape is transformed by a mix of human and non-human factors which change what is considered waste. Outside of human-centred economies, waste is always to some degree, matter in place, potentially regenerative, participating in an environment of flux and renewal of material energies that are open to unexpected forces coming from elsewhere.

The subject of this presentation is a place known as Dungeness, a shingle promontory of land situated on the south coast of England not far from Dover. I will be partly using photographic images made during the time I have been an inhabitant here, to consider how photographic representations of a place construct narratives of waste aesthetically, culturally, ecologically and economically. By assembling a network of cross-referencing narratives of habitation through these images, I follow Carlo Rovelli’s assertion that “all variable aspects of an object exist only in relation to other objects. It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.” Through these interactions it is possible to respond to waste not as dead, static matter, consigned to burial out of sight and mind but as a force of change and disturbance.

The presentation concludes with the recognition that as this landscape becomes increasingly commodified, its physical future is being determined by global as much as local consequences of waste production and disposal. As these are often imperceptible, the question then becomes one of understanding the relations between the very local and the global.

About the series

This is the second of six talks in the Reimagining Waste Landscapes seminar series, organised by Jonathan Gardner and funded by Edinburgh of Art and The Leverhulme Trust. See the Seminar Series' Eventbrite Collection for further details on all the talks or visit, https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/wastelandscapes/events/.

About the Speaker

Susan Trangmar is an artist interested in practices of place, the material formations of site and the relation between human and non-human forms of habitation.

Susan has been exhibiting since the 1980’s working with photo- based media, site specific installation and writing. She was Reader in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, UAL 2009 – 2020 and currently works with the artist collective sensingsite (sensingsite.blogspot.com).

Mer-Is-Land-Is-Sea: A Collective Approach to Place, Susan Trangmar in ‘Entwined: Rural, Land. Lives. Art.’ Eds. Collier and Pailing, 2021: AEN (Art Editions North).

susantrangmar.com