Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (with videographer Ali Al-Deek), Waste Underground, 2017. 14:40 minutes, HD video. Copyright: Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins.
Waste Underground by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (with videographer Ali Al-Deek) is available online in e-flux Issue #127 (May 2022) along with a roundtable discussion on “Toxic Politics of Waste” with Hanna Baumann, Adriana Massidda, Bassem Saad, Elizabeth Saleh, and Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins.
This group discussion explores how politics, toxicity, and subjectivities intersect, and highlights the role of film as a medium for approaching these subjects. The management of waste and the experiences of its toxic afterlives are riddled with uncertainty. How can we make sense of toxicity’s different temporalities and the entanglements of human and nonhuman entities it creates? More specifically, how can different forms of art and knowledge-production account for the often invisible trajectories of waste, its slow and difficult-to-trace effects, and the complexity of the political forces at play?
Hanna Baumann, Adriana Massidda, and Elizabeth Saleh were joined by the makers of two short films. Waste Underground (15’, 2017), by anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins and cinematographer Ali al-Deek, explores a landfill in the West Bank as underground storage space through the lens of Palestinian futurity. Kink Retrograde (19’, 2019), by artist and writer Bassem Saad, is set on a landfill on the Lebanese coast in the midst of the country’s ongoing waste crisis. Due to the places where these films are situated, the discussion focuses on questions of waste in Palestine and Lebanon, but also considers these particular situations in the context of global circulations and broader questions around the politics of toxicity.