Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Timo Menke
The illegal landfill at Marhult (in rural Småland, Sweden) poses the kind of multi-complex environmental risk typically associated with socio-economic conditions in the global South.
Dumped and scattered over the 30-hectare postindustrial sawmill ALEX since 2015 by a number of criminal networks, ca 35,000 tonnes of hazardous waste consisting of "fluff" (ground car parts), demolition debris, slaughterhouse waste and various microplastics have transformed both site and community into a toxic terra incognita.
The Marhult dump consists of a critical mass of archaeological, ecological and cultural agency ripe with deeply entangled relationships between what we call nature and culture, human and inhuman, or artifact and ecofact . Rather than zooming in on an environmental disaster to clean up, can the dump hold other valuable natural and cultural heritage significance to paradoxically “protect”?
Could waste constitute future natural-cultural heritage? Waste as a world heritage? How can artistic processes and interdisciplinary methods investigate, rethink and transform the unknown potential of waste as Natureculture?
In the summer of 2023 I launched the project NatureCulture Reserve Marhult 1 as part of the Småland Triennal 2 , inviting participants and collaborators from the Arts and Humanities for interdisciplinary site-specific and process-based investigations of the landfill.
My presentation of the project will give insight on challenging and renegotiating the binary concepts of natural and cultural heritage by considering waste as field, discourse and material for artistic processes. The ontological ambiguity of the dump between problem and resource, gift and burden, past and future is highlighted by diving into discard studies, namely Michael Marder’s Dump Philosophy (2020).
Timo Menke is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Stockholm. His practice is driven by an interest in dark objects, processes and methodologies to cultivate a “dark holism” – a new cosmopolitics of the dark encompassing the paradoxical complexity of (w)holeness. Using a wide spectrum of light-sensitive, performative, conceptual and text-based methods, his work deals with various forms of nature-cultures and their entangled histories, phenomena, and agencies.
Menke graduated from Konstfack in 1999 where he also taught as Assistant Professor in the Art Department between 2004-2014. Menke is represented by Moderna Museet Stockholm, Kalmar konstmuseum, Pori Art Museum and is distributed by Filmform – The Art Film and Video Archive.