Field Remediations: Salvage

• In Event: Remediating Remediation: Imagining Alternatives for Assessing and Redressing Environmental Harm - I

Abstract

Field Remediations Library is an assortment of objects that facilitate re-framing cultural practices that underlie environmental degradation, and arise from particular shared representations of nature. The project consists of activities, workshops and fieldwork conducted in New York, Shanghai and Poland, through which three collections of the library were populated. This paper presents the collection themed
In a turn to sustainability, the ‘post-consumption’ phase of our food systems — which manages the by-products of all other system phases — is to be reconfigured to recapture waste as resource to be reinvested. Field Remediation: SALVAGE explores reframing waste as resource, the notion of ’loss and damage,’ and the emergence of ‘feral’ possibilities. We have been slow in noticing the loss, Anna Tsing suggests, and we need to be ‘staying with the catastrophe’ to allow ‘mourning that lets us think about the damage around us.’ In support of this agenda of negotiations, we make it also ours: we look bad news directly in the face and describe ways of living with it and past it. With our future dependent on the opaque conference proceedings, we resort to studying the ambiences and indirect communications, patterns and intuitions. A set of scripts, tours and activities will render the conference legible to the public through its by-products, ambiences and detritus: incidental energy or material footprints, words exchanged about the quality of the morning coffee, paths negotiated between the conference venues, eccentric pieces of logistics or social and physical organisation, fortuitous axillary processes, chance infrastructure.

Authors

• Karolina Sobecka, fhnw

• Elzbieta Kowalska, Adam Mickiewicz University

• Alexandra Skowronska, Adam Mickiewicz University