Eat Garbage!
Praise to the Away PlaceKatherine Soucie is an artist and academic who has spent the last 20 years working to reclaim the means of disposal. Partnering with independent textile mills initially in Vancouver and now London, she is the goddess of the not-quite-sock. Currently, her Leyton studios are Medallin Mill and JALex Swift’s bins, the soul receiver of up to 250kg of clean textile waste monthly. From this mass of material, she organises, experiments and crafts to produce clothing, installations, and artworks, which are displayed in galleries and/or sold to an intimate patron-like consumer base. Her heart is as a researcher, teacher, seagull, scavenger, crafter, not mall business owner, though she may act as one; she expressed great resentment for this aspect of her practice, finding it to be confining, claustrophobic, unsettling, disingenuous and creatively stunting. Her true practice is centred in compassionate conversation with the disposed materials and machinery she finds herself working with. They manipulate one another, talk to one another through an intra-active craft, affect one another, achieving mutual creative liberation, constructing non-linear narratives that tell one another’s stories, and reaching DNA infused “end points” that encapsulate what is key – the process of making/becoming-between textile-y, mechanistic, and flesh-y souls. Soucie considers intelligence and soul as extending far beyond traditional *Anthropocenic* definitions, as embedded in both material and methodology (as though these could be considered separate anyway). Her wealth of skill in material manipulation, relentless curiosity, and tender feeling, position her as an agent acting with, and a translator for voices to which most are oblivious. Her process is a spiritual act, and active becoming, a mediation, and a process of learning. She embodies a word I cannot find in English, but with label as Divine Craft.
f.12-13 A(MEND) (2019) Katherine Soucie
f.14 Soucie’s Layton Studio Room 1 (2023) f.15 Soucie’s Layton Studio Room 2 (2023)
Soucie recounted how her material perceptions had shifted, as she stood at the cusp of adulthood, in a chance encounter with vast landfills in Canada; ‘it was from everything from like, recycling depots to general waste to animal waste to biomedical waste … just hundreds of acres with these pits,’ (Soucie, 2023). The landscape was scattered with 18-foot tractors and bulldozers, birds circling the scene from above and the sort of smell that lodges itself in one’s nose. Feelings of astonishment, beauty, wonder, and guilt swirled, and Soucie felt intrinsically tied to this hyper-modern landscape. She saw herself, her residue lost and indistinguishable, but undeniably embedded within these garbage pits, she was in Gaia, becoming-planet. Landfills are ‘the mines of the future,’ she said, the largest and most bountiful, untapped resource (Soucie, 2023). They are Gaia’s youngest and fastest growing biome, yet to stabilise, that will spawn critters with unmatched resilience. Her excursion to this part of herself, and her cultural normality that she’d been forcibly divorced from, changed her life’s direction entirely. She vowed to use from it, respect and embed value in waste, take from the Away place rather than add to it, or worse, ignore it.
The landfill excursion should be mandatory in every school curriculum, but that would violate human-centric health and safety guidance. Instead, we are taught the importance of cleanliness, a removal of our residual self from our acting self – our material memory as it exists in biodegradable and non-biodegradable objects from our figurative memory that morphs and changes in the brain place – it removes what we’ve done from who we are, how we affect from how we continue to act. ‘Leaving things clean over here,’ we flush our remnants ‘into a totally different sphere called Away,’ but with(in) Gaia, ‘there is no Away … no here and no there,’ instead, there is what we can and cannot (or choose not to) observe (Morton, 2013, p.31). ‘Away’thus becomes an ideologically and materially toxic sphere, intrinsic to the maintenance of white/human supremacy, capitalist enterprise, and economic growth. Rich, western, capitalist, countries, home to the vast majority of those acting in and profiting from hyper-consumerism, become a 3rd level simulacrum, an obscured image of a holistic world that, ‘masks the absenceof a profound reality,’ (Baudrillard, 1994, p.6). This forgotten reality, however, is immediately tangible to those in countries subject to imperialistic waste exportation. One cannot be ignorant to this system when its repercussions are on their doorstep.
The simulacrum is curated by western capitalist systems. In the UK, the population majority employed in service industry [approximately 81% in 2021 in the UK (O’Neill, 2023)] and access to necessary living requirements [food, property, etc.] is unavailable outside of purchase, creating localised ignorance to global chains of production and disposal, manifested further through capitalist-centric education, nationalist propaganda, and labour-induced exhaustion. This system purposefully naturalises lacking criticality, curiosity, and care for how things got here, and where they’re going next. The answer is to the Away place, or the great pacific garbage patch, or massive landfills in Turkey, Holland, India, Canada, Mexico, and China (Eurostat, 2022) (Donovan & Pickin, 2021) (Alves, 2023). The landfill trade is a lucrative industry, and for some countries that have been economically stunted by a long legacy of colonialism, a dependable source of national income, though it reinforces euro-centric power dynamics and effectively continues colonisation through matter of waste instead of persons (Michealson, 2021). The culture of disposal, (and correlating hyper-consumerism, trend chasing, obsession with cleanliness) hence not only reinforces human-supremacy, but white-supremacy.