Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Sonja Lampinen, Olli Pyyhtinen & Niina Uusitalo
Our presentation employs the gift as a conceptual resource in onto-epistemological musings on the givenness of data in physical form. Starting from Jean-Luc Marion’s assertion that ‘[w]hat shows itself, first gives itself”, we explore the phenomenality of data as manifestation and manifestation as givenness. The data that we focus on is waste, in connection to ongoing ‘garbographic’ fieldwork in two interdisciplinary research projects (WasteMatters; DECAY). In the presentation, we discuss how our video piece ‘What Remains?’ produced for the art exhibition of the June event explores the givenness of waste as data that is material, and the related practices of tracing, noticing, and (re)presenting it.
Critically contesting the privilege that social scientific methods assign to language, meaning, and culture, as well as the elevation of speech over writing, we ask to what extent might discarded materials amount to a sort of illegible, asemic writing, that is, to nonrepresentational traces that do not communicate anything else but their disturbing material presence. We also discuss how the themes of gift and waste were integral to our practices of making the video, insofar as a considerable amount of the raw footage that we used for it consists of discovered and appropriated digital excess. The givenness of the material – and the fact that it was put out there, given for free – in a sense amounted to a primordial gift that made it possible for us to make the work.
Sonja Lampinen is a Bachelor of Sociology, currently working on her Master’s thesis on the Onkalo nuclear waste repository. She is particularly interested in the temporal complexities that different forms of waste create, as well as the processes of exclusion and inclusion and the systems of ordering and governing involved. Sonja holds a Diploma of Screen and Media from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and has a background in working in audio and video production. She has a keen interest in these mediums and combining them with doing research. She is inspired by wastelands, ruins, entanglements of humans and non-humans, borders and boundaries and everything that challenges them.
Olli Pyyhtinen is Professor of Sociology and the founder of Relational Studies Hub (RS Hub) at Tampere University, Finland. His research intersects social theory, philosophically inclined fieldwork, STS, economic sociology, and the study of art, and he is the author of for example More-than-Human Sociology (2015), The Gift and Its Paradoxes (2014), The Simmelian Legacy (2018), and Simmel and ‘the Social’ (2010). Pyyhtinen is the PI of the GIFT project (Kone Foundation, 2021-2024) organising the conference, and currently he is also leading two projects on the leaky realities of waste and the circular economy, WasteMatters (ERC Consolidator Grant) and DECAY (Research Council of Finland).
Niina Uusitalo is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University, Finland. Currently she is working at the intersection of visual studies and waste studies. Her theoretical interests lie in politics of aesthetics, eco-philosophy and more-than-human methodologies. In her work she explores theoretical concepts through photography and videography.