Waste Archipelago (2021)

In 2019 I was awarded the Sustainable Art Prize by Arte Verona and Sostenibile Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. As recipient of the prize I was invited to develop a project with students and academics at Ca’ Foscari University to explore issues of sustainability related to one or more of the seventeen goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. I decided to develop practical and theoretical sessions to explore different perspectives on and our lived experience of waste, which I called Waste Matters. Whilst previous prize winners had developed projects in which students became involved in the physical making of the work, I wanted to involve them from first moment in a collective thinking and making. I wanted the work to develop out of the sessions, as a form of devised practice in which the process is not determined from the outset, but in which outcomes are temporal manifestations of the thinking and making together. I also brought this approach to the sessions by developing each in relation to reflections on the previous session, and in response to the students’ engagement, the academics’ research, and by thinking through relevant texts. The loose title of the project, Waste Matters, pivots between the two words and their meanings and has an urgency to stress the importance of its subject. Themes that I focused on included waste in terms of matter out of place, classification and colonialism, the herbarium and botanical, waste as vibrant matter, mapping domestic and societal waste, and exploring food, recipes, and familial memories through waste.

At the time of developing the project 'Waste Matters' with students and academics at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, I was particularly struck by the ecological consequences of the MV Wakashio oil spill near the marine park of Blue Bay in Mauritius, the island of my father’s birth, and the construction of homemade ballasts by local people using straw and hair to soak up the oil in the water. Through the process of thinking and making with the students and academics at Ca’ Foscari, and my connections with ecological disasters occurring at that moment in the place of my father’s birth, I began to create 'Waste Archipelago', 2021, a new body of photographic, installation, and event-based work that explores waste through the prism of the archipelago, and the interconnectedness of how we conceive of, create, and manage waste through our relationships with objects and our bodies.

I started to explore issues and activities relating to waste, focused around a video work, Plot, that I made in 2015. I shot the footage in Mauritius, around the intricacies of a small, supposedly ‘empty’ plot of land in the north of the island, that was once owned by my father. The plot was actually teeming with life. Amongst the rubbish and leftover building materials insects, birds, and animals took shelter in what felt like a small respite of space in the midst of the concrete small-scale tourist developments built in the area. It was whilst taking a break from filming that I made my first visit to Curepipe Botanical Garden, where I came across the last known remaining tree of the hyophorbe amaricaulis palm species, which found itself framed by the botanical garden, which was established in 1870. A hundred years earlier the main botanical garden on the island, Pamplemousses Botanical Garden, had been set up by the French colonial administration. It was under the British colonial administration that the smaller garden at Curepipe was established, with the initial goal of cultivating varieties of plants that could not grow in the less temperate regions of the island. This last remaining tree of a species and the ideas of emptiness of a plot of land converged into thinking through ‘waste’ in terms of ideas of categorisation, framing, and visibility and invisibility.