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The Artful Excess of Waste: a River Installation - Margaret Sommerville

Date: Thursday 14 March 2019
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EZ.G.23, Western Sydney University Parramatta South campus

The Artful Excess of Waste: a River Installation

Presenter: Professor Margaret Sommerville (Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University)

Discussant: Dr Astrida Neimanis

Abstract

This presentation draws from a collaboration with Susan Nordstrom, University of Memphis, Tennessee and our exchange across continents and hemispheres. Our rivers’ waste meets symbolically on remote Hendersen Island in the Pacific Ocean with more plastic than any other surface on earth. Plastic and waste call us back to our rivers, the Nepean and Mississippi to think with waste. Waste creates with, and on us, moves us from its affective production of disgust and aggression, to embrace its proliferation as Artful excess. The orange chair sings, waste’s installation moves and dances, waste’s flood art creates nests for listerine bottle, flip flops, as we struggle to embrace its artful and excessive proliferation in search of a new syntax, a foreign language within the language (Deleuze, 2006). Our thought experiment with waste materializes transformative becomings that generate past-present-future affective residues of wonder about the materialities of litter and rivers. In this presentation I focus on one aspect of these creations with waste, a series of intallations on the Nepean River at Emu Green. I playfully explore the meanings of the artful production of waste in relation to bodies: bodies of waste, bodies of rivers, bodies of humans, and bodies of theory.

Biography

Margaret Somerville is a professor of Education at Western Sydney University. She is interested in alternative and creative approaches to research and writing, with a focus on relationship to place and planetary wellbeing. Her research has been carried out in collaboration with Aboriginal communities, schools and school children, and her doctoral students in the Space, Place, Body cohort. Her most recent research, an international ARC funded study, Naming the world, involves collaboration with very young children and their extraordinary capacities in world naming. Her new book, Rivers of the Anthropocene will be published in Routledge’s Environmental Humanities series in 2020.