BIN Day

MODULE: PHO730 (SUSTAINABLE STRATEGIES)

Statement of Intent

This project was born from a desire to understand the nondescript new town in which I live, through the process of a series of weekly psychogeographic walks with my camera. By the end though - by dint of the day of the week I chose to do this - it also became a study of an oft ignored moment in the weekly routine of most people in the British Isles. That is, Bin Day.

Surprisingly little has been said culturally about this weekly ritual of trundling out the wheelie bin. Certainly compared to the days of rag and bone men (recyclers of a different age) and how they featured in the national psyche just a few decades ago.

Nowadays we try to hide our consumptive nature in our back gardens, but one day a week we are forced to roll our wastefulness out into the street for all to see.

I have long considered myself to be trying to work as a sort of artist-archaeologist, working in the field of contemporary archaeology; that is, the archaeology of the now and the recent past. This may seem a strange concept, yet it's a growing (and particularly inclusive) field in the world of archaeology. This concept arguably stemmed from archaeology’s fascination with our garbage, and a man called William Rathje’s realisation that that fascination could be turned to modern day concerns. He saw the direct connection between the things we discard and the things our long gone ancestors did.

"Garbage is among humanity’s most prodigious physical legacies to those who have yet to be born; if we can come to understand our discards [...] then we will better understand the world in which we live." (Rathje and Murphy 2001).

He used archaeological processes to excavate the impossibly huge landfill sites outside major North American cities. He became known as the garbologist, and he and his team uncovered valuable insights into our consumer society in the process.

This led to an explosion in what is now known as contemporary archaeology. With it came an invitation of sorts (Harrison and Schofield 2020) for artists to work in this space too, to help in the understanding of the world we live in. This has influenced me profoundly.

So it felt appropriate to play visually with these random assemblages on our streets, recording the moment before Rathje would have started rummaging.

This work then, operates as homage to William Rathje who arguably opened up archaeological thinking to artists; and as a small story about something many of us try to ignore, a way to hold up a mirror to suburbia’s comfort with consumption. To me it seems that small stories are our cultural discard, and so must be preserved; the very title of archaeologist James Deetz's book "In Small Things Forgotten" (Deetz 2013) illustrates this particularly elegantly.

The work was displayed on my own wheelie bins - which somehow felt appropriate - and recorded as an experimental 3D photogrammetry file which is available online. However, due to a dip in image quality with this process, I have chosen to primarily display the work as a web page.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEETZ, James. 2013. In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. New York: Anchor Books.

HARRISON, Rodney and A. J. SCHOFIELD. 2020. After Modernity: Archaeological Approaches to the Contemporary Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

RATHJE, William L. and Cullen MURPHY. 2001. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.