Nina Samuel – författare

Remnants are a challenge for the museum as an institution. They are ambiguous figures, and their attributions open up and thus contribute to transcending the taxonomic, disciplinary, architectural, and institutional boundaries of museums. They can be found everywhere—in exhibition spaces as well as storage depots, and in laboratories just as in the administration. In each of these contexts, there are respectively different forms of professional self-conception, knowledge, and practical handling that determine the status of remnants. The volume contributes to specifying terms such as remnant, trash, traces, and boundaries more precisely within the context of the museum and to reassessing them for debates in conservation, curating, art history, and museum anthropology.

Waste is political. Waste is social. Waste is economic, ecological, and colonial. It embodies traces of the past and imaginaries of the future. In this book, artists, designers, and art scholars discuss the perception and handling of waste materiality, including practical approaches to coexistence. Exploring transnational narratives of material traces, the contributions examine the interplay of representation, temporality, and technology. Attentive to the accumulated leftovers of previous generations and the unsettling prospect of a ‘new world disorder’, the publication emphasizes interconnectedness and dependency within a more-than-human world. Against the backdrop of a postcolonial understanding of material culture and the implications of the Anthropocene, how could a multi-perspective conception of waste in space and time be embraced?Waste and beyondCaring for planetary conditionsMultifaceted perspectives on materiality