GEOVisions: Land Bodies Glossary
Centre to Periphery is a long-term design and research project that investigates discarding and the role of landfills, as an antiquated disposal method and their entrenchment within contemporary waste management. Constructed ever further on the periphery, landfills have become a “geospatial other” – a sacrificed zone – destined to receive the residues of hazardous waste streams, waste incineration and recycling streams, which to this day enables the centre to flourish and thus necessitates the landfills’ existence.
The project consists of several chapters and includes field research, interviews, visual journalism and documentation of various sites across the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and Scotland.
Unwittingly, the language invented to describe the processes of managing waste has likely contributed to obscuring their implications and realities.
Likewise myths arose that suggest sense of control and the problem of surplus matter being resolved, such as recycling. All the while, it appears as if landfills are to stay with us for lack of scaleable alternatives such as zero waste. Might the deconstruction of these myths and language aid a different reading and hence engagement with landbodies built on the globalised fiction of carbon modernity?
The GeoVisions Landbodies Glossary tries to dissect language to bring audiences nearer to the reality of contemporary waste streams.
Risograph-printed in silver by Herr & Frau Rio, Munich.
