Georama of Trash
Lisbon Architecture Triennale, The World in Our Eyes, 2016
Project Team:
El Hadi Jazairy + Rania Ghosn
Jia Weng, Ya Suo, Sheung Chui Carol Nung
Georama of Trash deploys the representational device of the panorama to make public controversies surrounding trash and the uneven geographies it produces in Detroit. In the contemporary Age of Environment, although the scale of waste management expands beyond city boundaries, trash continues
to be largely understood as a technical problem about the management of its disappearance. The project argues for the significance of a representational aesthetic conversation on urban systems. It draws its material from The Geographies of Trash research publication. The book charts geographies of trash in Michigan across scales and proposes five speculative projects that reclaim the forms, technologies, economies and logistics of the waste system. The georama collects these five projects into a single large-scale drawing. The image-machine places the undesired matter of the trash bag –its flows, ecologies, logistics, managerial structures, and labor– at the center of the “Theater of the World.”