Anamaya Farthing Kohl + Nathalie Wuerth and

Anthony Graesch

Anthony Graesch: In the context of the quotidian lived experience, North Americans rarely enter into conversation with their discard. An admixture of solid waste handling/removal infrastructure and health codes masks a torrent of discard that ceaselessly flows from industrial, commercial, and household domains. Some have argued that an inability to reflect on discard as subjects/objects — especially their qualities, quantities, and significance — impedes opportunities to reflect on discarding as a culturally situated behavior and disposition. 

In what ways do you think your work might permeate the bureaucratic, social, and historical barriers that impede conversations with discard? Was this an objective of your project from the outset? You created a loom on which objects, recovered deliberately from the tipping floor, are woven. In what ways do you think/hope your creative work elicits such a conversation? And to what end?

Anamaya Farthing-Kohl: I was coming to RAIR from Centro Histórico in Mexico City. Trucks aren’t allowed in the Centro Histórico during the day, including for trash pickup, so around 19:00 when all the vendors head home, a trash pile accumulates outside my apartment building, and throughout the night I hear sounds of people sorting and removing the pile. In the earlier hours, what’s left is mostly split-open plastic bags, organic waste, and things that once resembled one thing, but are in the process of becoming something else. One thing that really excites, saddens, and terrifies me while standing on the tipping floor is that things are on the edge of losing their thingness. They come in with solid bodies and clear outlines, and leave as amalgamations of something else, based on their materials. What I am trying to say is that what comes in looking like a set of a house or office, leaves as what people might consider trash. Our weaving slows down this process, pushing people to look at the things that are discarded. People who saw the weaving were often surprised by what we found in the “trash.” 

Things that are discarded innately lose their owner. They are “severed,” to use your language Anthony. I think this gave us some liberty to use things that we would never have thought of, and gave the weaving a level of intimacy. 

Nathalie Wuerth: I think the residency has made me more aware of issues around discard. It has informed me about the management of waste streams in the city or, more precisely, in an area of Philadelphia. In Stockholm, Sweden, where I live, I have a similar experience of cover-up when it comes to waste and the infrastructure of handling waste. It is invisibilized. Even when it comes to everyday household waste in Stockholm, we have small architectural units in the streets or in the gardens that look like small garden sheds, made specifically for household waste disposal. The sheds are color-schemed and they blend into the environment. For larger demolitions, homeowners rent big textile containers that they leave on the sidewalks for demolition companies to pick up.The fact that waste is collected during the night, even if it has practical reasons, also taps into this idea of making waste invisible. In French, there is an expression, ni vu, ni connu, which is used when you make things go away, when you eradicate the traces of something unwanted and pretend “as if it never happened.” That gesture of making things disappear, or concealing the relationship between, or even the interdependence of consumption and waste, feels like a kind of mystification.

Reminiscent of magic tricks, that gesture of making things disappear also makes me think of attitudes toward housework, which is a question that I have been engaged with in my artistic practice. My entry point into the issue of housework, and why it has been devalued in society, comes from feminist thought and struggle. I can see how this ties into the work around waste and infrastructures of waste, which I was exposed to through my collaboration with Anamaya, during our residency at RAIR. 

There is this famous line from Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!: “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” There is some kind of denial, neglect, or afterthought in the way that society deals with reproduction and waste. There is a silent collusion that shrouds the relations between consumption and waste and production and reproduction.

More than anything, I think it’s a question of ethics that attracts me to these subject materials. I think that is articulated in our weaves, where we present materials that are on the other side of production and consumption. Instead of doing advertising — showing the pristine stage of many of the things that pass through the waste stream — we catch the things at the end of their lives, and probe what networks of meaning, and circuits of use, they navigate. The end of their lifetime or lifecycle. 

I think that the weaving could work as a billboard on top of a building or along the highway. It would present a series of things held together by the loom, as if caught by a net. It would show the backside, the reverse of objects that usually occupy that space on billboards. Ideally, it would be a collective work, where people work together to decide on the things to put in the weaving. 

AG: A brief portion of our three-way conversation addressed the issue of scale — the scale of public awareness of ecological and social issues surrounding discard, but also the sheer magnitude, volume, and/or weight of the discard that is processed every day at Revolution Recovery. Your weavings comprise modest collections of intentionally selected objects, or what you refer to as “constellations of things” and “a library of things.” 

I might argue that the audience must navigate a tension here: object-centered significance or meaning, on the one hand, and the whole of relationships, on the other. I wonder if this is a necessary juxtaposition, or even a dialectic of sorts, if we are to overcome barriers — structural, social, psychological — to exploring the challenges of contemporary forms of materiality, or the ways that we relate to our physically constructed world vis-à-vis the impacts on our ecologies/ecosystems (e.g., resource extraction and ever-expanding toxicities). This is a bit of a leading question, of course, but I wonder if you can reflect on the ways that your work conveys “scale” while communicating and/or eliciting other meanings.

AFK: In our work there are various changes of scale, considering the narrative voice of the weavings — from personal stories to the collaborative, from the stories that came out of our workshops, to those at the tipping yard. 

In our workshops, we ask people to always talk in the first-person. This is a practice that I learned from María Galindo from Mujeres Creando. We use it as a method to avoid generalizations and assumptions. Narrative practice therapy is based on the philosophy that we are experts in our own lives and experiences, and there is a beauty in the trust-setting when we listen/talk to someone in the first-person. Our definition for the constellations of things is: the things we organize and the things that organize us. The things in our lives make portraits of us. 

In working with Nathalie, one thing that was a challenge and a pleasure was that our constellations are different. We often meet at residencies to work together, which also gives us access to an entirely different night sky–constellation. For me, part of the exercise of being on the tipping floor was to look with Nathalie’s constellation in mind. I guess you could say I was looking through Nathalie’s cult value at each thing’s aura. This same thing would happen when I would look at the tipping floor through the cult value that our library of things and their stories represented. 

Another change of scale that happened at RAIR, was the actual change in scale from a single bed-sized weaving to a billboard-sized one. This opened up a lot of possibilities, to place things of a different scale in the weave. 

NW: I agree there is a contradiction between what I would call a subjective point of view — which according to me, is at the basis of the methodology we have adopted for our project Skäl — and the logic of the waste stream, which in many ways breaks down the contextual embeddedness of things. The dump, or the recycling center Revolutionary Recovery, is the context for the things that land on the tipping floor. Even legally, from what I understand, the stuff that ends up at the recycling center belongs to the dump for the time it’s being handled there. It is part of a transactional exchange from the transport company to the recycling center. 

One might imagine the dump as an impersonal space, but I think that it clearly has continuity with the living and social life of things. There were some things that we saw coming into the dump that really made an impact on us, and had us wondering how they ended up there. There was this footlocker that belonged to a veteran who fought in the Korean War. Military things like uniforms and arms, mixed with personal paraphernalia, kept in tidy rows. There were tourist photos from Japan, and some signed photos from a Japanese family from different epochs. There was also a scarf with a Japanese insignia and blood stains on it, and chopsticks, and precious stones. We were speculating if the deceased had met someone during the war and kept contact, or if it was a war trophy. There was a whole universe in there. It would have felt weird to dismantle that footlocker and display it — out of respect for its previous owner and also the ones who had gotten rid of it. It would have felt like reviving a dead corpse or bringing back a ghost. At the same time, it felt as if it belonged in a museum — because the things were very well-preserved and the items told stories. 

I don’t think we could have done anything to that footlocker without asking permission from the family. At least that’s what I felt. I mean, the name of the deceased was on several of the items in the footlocker and we could have easily found more information about him and his family, if we had wanted to. But it wouldn’t have been an easy task to knock on someone’s door holding in one’s arms what they might have wanted to get rid of, or that someone single-handedly had thrown out, maybe unknowingly or against the will of other family members. Maybe, on the contrary, someone would have been happy to see it again. There’s a whole line of investigation that is possible here. 

That’s where this notion of severance that you, Anthony, introduced to us, becomes really important. Thinking of the things that come to the recycling center as the consequence of severance. Some kind of severance has taken place, and stands in for an act of care. It could be the result of divorce or eviction, mental health issues or lack of time, isolation or bereavement. Personally, I was more interested in this aspect of severance, and was on the lookout for items that would tap into that narrative. Things come in on the flatbeds of trucks and form assemblages, a set of things coming from a single household, held in proximity. Those assemblages are the last glimpses of the things’ social context before they become atomized, itemized as singular objects in a mass of other things. I liked the idea that the assemblages gave the things some kind of meaning, and was looking for ways they engaged with the themes of our project, Skäl. 

Our methodology is based on the idea of Skäl, which is taken from the specialized language of weaving. Our Skäl is the opening of a social space where our differences meet — Maya’s and mine to start off with, but also all the physical spaces and people that we met and invited into our process, in Stockholm, Puebla, Mexico City, New York, and Philadelphia.

In a sense, it is ironic for us to operate in a recycling center where things are about to become itemized, or reduced to their base components. The sheer mass of stuff is daunting. It’s almost like noise. It’s overwhelming on a physical, emotional, and cognitive level. It really puts into perspective the terminology we had forged in working through our own process and methodology. 

In the context of the waste stream, it’s ironic and absurd to work with terms such as “constellations of things” and “a library of things.” Both terms denote some kind of exhaustive, if not objective, knowledge or classification system, whereas the cosmologies and libraries that we work from are very personal and subjective. To match the context of the waste stream at the recycling center, we would have had to work more actively with other people in order to add their personal cosmologies to ours in the Skäl that we were operating within. Then, different voices and experiences would hold the things in place in the same way our weavings do. The weight is distributed over the surface, held by a number of threads. The more persons involved, the more their subjective and personal perspectives would match the site of the recycling center. We did this indirectly, engaging passersby and workshop participants in discussions around the things. But thinking of the issue around scale, I think there should have been more people involved directly, in order to match the site. 

In the rubble, we seized and took out things from the waste stream that had resonance with the cosmologies that we had started to gather in previous contexts. There was, of course, a translation to be made from our initial cosmologies — those we made individually in our homes in 2020 during the pandemic, that contained personal items of ours, and that related to the concept of “things that hold us, and things that we hold.” Translated into the site of the recycling center, some things had their meanings shifted, because of scale, and the specificity of the site at RAIR, among other reasons. 

As an example, in my personal cosmology of things that I made in Stockholm, I had one of the porcelain tea cups my mother used to drink warm drinks from. The cup had a certain pattern, and felt very “cosmological” to me. As a thing, it also gave associations of warmth both literally and symbolically: keeping your hands around the cup to keep warm. As we built on the things we had in our cosmologies at home, looking for porcelain cups in the dump highlighted the frailty and the precariousness of the porcelain cup in this environment. Here, it was celebrated as a survivor coming out of debris of crushed glass and smashed furniture and homeware. The operations at the tipping floor are brutal. When we were working there, we had to be quick to catch stuff we saw coming in the trucks and being tipped on the dusty ground. There would be trucks lining up outside of the recycling center, and we weren’t supposed to slow down the business. To me, our cosmologies, even if they only represent an infinitesimal part of what’s going on at the recycling center, are in keeping with the feminist embodied practice that was part of our Skäl. 

On the object-oriented perspective of the things in the waste stream, could you expand a bit more on this, Anthony?

AG: I gather that weaving on a loom of your own creation is a long, nuanced endeavor. I was struck by your discussion of how conversation is a core, essential element of your creative and intellectual process — conversations with workshop participants, with your collaborator(s), and with yourself. This “becoming” is seemingly responsive to the perceptions/needs/voices of many, as much as it is directed by a few: a collective stance on the ways that our material worlds shape us, as well as the ways that we shape them. Can you reflect a little more on these ideas and the ways that weaving in the loom captures/reflects this process?

AFK: Weaving is a very old storytelling practice. I think our weavings are a place for storing story. I see weavings as a place of conversation. For me, conversation has been a way to learn, and a method to make space for other stories. In our work together, we have used collaboration as a methodology to center the stories that are shared in our workshops. Putting a thing in the loom that is from someone’s cosmology, or that someone considers a master’s tool, does two things: it takes the thing out of circulation, but also monumentalizes its story. 

In some ways, I think this has been a coping mechanism to deal with the conflicts that arise between us. Inviting others inside our Skäl helps it continue as a flexible space that also decentralizes us as the sole authors.  

NW: Yes, we have gathered around things as a way of telling stories, and also, of mapping power structures in society. To be fair, our work is very much a process, and the project has developed as we go along. We had this particular reading of things, through the essay by the “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde called “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Lorde’s essay says that we need to think of new tools in order to create new relations of power in society. It’s not enough to seize and occupy the institutions of a former class, as they are inherently unjust, and we will only reproduce their formula. We need to create new ones, and thus think of new tools to create them. 

So we had this very literal understanding of what the master’s tools are, and invited people to interpret that concept from their own experiences and lives. One of the reasons we started to think through this text was because of the concept Skäl, borrowed from the technical language of weaving. The Skäl, in a way, is a meeting point, a crossing of the threads of the warp and the weft — it’s an intersection. Talking about the master’s tools was a way of talking about power structures and how people are situated within these, or how they situate themselves within these. In a way, at least for me, it was about figuring out how we can understand intersections through the process of mapping our place in the world, through our relationship to objects. And also to understand the role and power of objects in the shaping of our world.

AFK: As Nathalie says, reading Audre Lorde’s text, and asking people to interpret it with the things they brought, is a method of refracting the ways we mirror power dynamics. Talking makes this mirroring much more evident, and opens up space for the mirror to fracture — reorganizing the image, opening a new space.