an investigation into the wastes of building, writing and collecting
The Centre for Medical Humanities is delighted to welcome Dr Will Viney, who joins our research team as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Medical Humanities and Department of English Studies.
Will has a PhD in Cultural Studies and Humanities from The London Consortium, University of London (thesis title: "Waste Effects: Building, Writing and Collecting"), and degrees from the University of Durham and the University of Sussex.
I’m excited to be publishing my work with I. B. Tauris and working with Liza Thompson. My book, Waste: A Philosophy of Things, will published in the second half of 2013. Based on my doctoral work, the book explores the significance of waste in sculpture, literature and architecture.
Landfill Harmonic is an upcoming feature-length documentary about a remarkable orchestra from a remote village in Paraguay, where its young musicians play with instruments made from trash:
Cateura, Paraguay is a town essentially built on top of a landfill. Garbage collectors browse the trash for sellable goods, and children are often at risk of getting involved with drugs and gangs. When orchestra director Szaran and music teacher Favio set up a music program for the kids of Cateura, they soon have more students than they have instruments.
That changed when Szaran and Favio were brought something they had never seen before: a violin made out of garbage. Today, there’s an entire orchestra of assembled instruments, now called ‘The Recycled Orchestra’.
Our film shows how trash and recycled materials can be transformed into beautiful sounding musical instruments, but more importantly, it brings witness to the transformation of precious human beings.
I have a new thing to make a noise about. Lovely pictures. ‘Two by Two: A Timeline of Twins’, Cabinet (Fall, 2012). Thanks Cabinet!
I will be giving a paper entitled ‘Eliot’s Exhalations’ – a short piece about reading manuscript drafts and textual waste – at the TRASH conference at the University of Sussex in September. The conference organisers describe their aims: ‘Trash operates as a physical and symbolic manifestation of consumer society and its associated debris; it celebrates the filthy, excessive and grotesque; and it expresses how power communicates and classifies abject bodies. It not only describes the devaluation of trash culture, but it also refers to the material practices and processes through which we deal with ‘waste’ in all its forms. This one day conference will rummage through the trash heap of history, art, media, culture, politics, and society in order to uncover new scholarly approaches and methods that continue to appropriate and recycle theories of trash.’
Guest speaker: Dr Tracey Potts, University of Nottingham
Arpad Boczen, Sweet Urban Stink in our Ears, Advanced School of Architecture, Budapest
Francisco Calafate-Faria, The ‘Museum of Rubbish’ in Curitiba: Short-Cycling or Line of Flight?, Goldsmiths, University of London
Sarah Carney, ‘Sometimes a tampon in a banana skin is just a tampon in a banana skin’— Don DeLillo: keeping trash trash because beauty is truth and truth is death, University of Sussex
Amy Carson, Title TBC, University of Leeds,
Munira Cheema, Assessing the power of Trash TV in Pakistani television culture, University of Sussex
Natacha Chevalier, When waste was trash: The thrifty 30s and 40s, University of Sussex
Bel Deering, Mortal Remains: the perils, pitfalls and pleasures of studying rubbish in a graveyard setting, University of Brighton
Simon Hobbs, Antichrist as the Culturally Schizophrenic Artefact, University of Portsmouth
Chris Lloyd, Hurricane Katrina and the South’s disposable (trashy) bodies, Goldsmiths, University of London
James MacDowell, So Bad it’s Good: Value, Intention, and the Aesthetics of Ironic Appreciation, University of Warwick
Claire Reddleman, “Modern and contemporary route-finding”: reactivating dead labour as spheres of appearance in ‘Pennine Street 2012, Goldsmiths, University of London
Cheryl Roberts, Skeletons in her Cupboard, University of Brighton
Clare Thomas, Plastic Beaches, Plastic Sea, University College Falmouth
Will Viney, Eliot’s Exhalations, Assistant Editor, Pluto Press; Commissioning Editor, Pod Academy
Tally Yaacobi-Gross, Remembering the discarded: Waste, guilt and trauma, Goldsmiths, University of London
Nowadays, I actually feel it both more plausible and infinitely more soothing to think of a culture as a meteorological phenomenon. Almost immeasurably complex interactions of a small number of number of determinate variables – wind-speed and direction, pressure, temperature – produce determinate weather effects. There is no difficulty in establishing whether it is or is not, at any particular place and time, raining. But what is the ‘it’ that is raining, and that, so to speak, wills or weathers the weather? And where, or what is this it, before it becomes available to be presupposed as the action of an intending awareness? I hope we will want, or mean to learn to want, not to think of society as having self-consciousness and actively self-directing purpose on the analogy of an individual will. A cloud forms, a waterfall plunges and seethes; but not as a expression of the will, the desire or the unease of the cloud or the waterfall. Steve Connor, ’What Can Cultural Studies Do?’ in Interrogating Cultural Studies: Interviews in Cultural Theory, Practice and Politics, ed. Paul Bowman (London: Pluto Press, 2003).
Weather Reports: a symposium on the work of Steven Connor
Keynes Library
Room 114,
43 Gordon Square,
10am till 5:30pm
I will be airing some of my new work on the subject of twins at this symposium. Papers will be given in honour of Steve Connor who, after decades of teaching and researching at Birkbeck College, University of London, will be moving to the English department at Cambridge in September.
Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies presents:
TRASH
A one day postgraduate conference at the University of Sussex
Friday 14th September 2012
Trash operates as a physical and symbolic manifestation of consumer society and its associated debris; it celebrates the filthy, excessive and grotesque; and it expresses how power communicates and classifies abject bodies. It not only describes the devaluation of trash culture, but it also refers to the material practices and processes through which we deal with ‘waste’ in all its forms.
In this one day postgraduate conference we propose to rummage through the trash heap of history, art, media, culture, politics, and society in order to uncover new scholarly approaches and methods that continue to appropriate and recycle theories of trash.
We welcome papers from postgraduate researchers considering the decayed, disposed of, degraded and decried from a range of academic disciplines.
To coincide with TRASH at the University of Sussex the conference organisers will also be curating an evening of art, film and music in central Brighton on Thursday 13th September. The evening will be the welcome event for the conference and it will also provide the opportunity to engage with and network around the theme of trash outside of the academy.
We are seeking proposals for a range of contribution formats to be considered for either the conference or the evening event:
Art, art installation, performance and photography.
Please send a Word document to sccs-conf@sussex.ac.uk by Monday 16th July 2012 containing the following information:
We also have two bursaries of £50 available to postgraduate students who will be travelling from outside Brighton and contributing to the conference. If you wish to apply for a bursary please attach a separate Word document containing a 200 word statement. Please explain how and why attending this conference will benefit your research and include an estimate of your costs.
Conference registration will open in July, please check the blog for details. The conference fees are £10 or £5 (students).
Email: sccs-conf@sussex.ac.uk
Blog: http://sussextrashconference.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @SCCS_
I have a new article up on Material World, here. Material World is an interactive, online hub for contemporary debates, discussion, thinking and research centred on material and visual culture. It was founded by scholars working in the anthropology departments of University College London and New York University.
The article explores the relationship between waste, archaeology and the sculptural work of Mark Dion.
Details of a new series of The Thread. I have helped Andrea Vesentini produce an hour-long show that considers the storage of waste, specifically within the context of the 2008 Naples waste crisis. Contributors include Annamarie Cumiskey (investigative journalist), Geoff Andrews (Open University) and Ben Campkin (University College London).
