Living matters
Encounters with Deep Time environments
Shadow Walkshop
The activities at Gärstad Garbage station are connected with several unrecognized shadow places "that provide our material and ecological support, most of which, in a global market, are likely to elude our knowledge and responsibility" (Plumwood 2007). They are the underground places, extraction locations and depositories that constitue the dark corners that the garbage market systems thrives on and that diffract through a particular location like this.
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The garbage incineration plant by night
In the shadows of the plant are the motorway and the extraction activities that have eaten into the fields. There are scars in the landscape that will not heal until tectonic forces do repairwork.
Use this map to see the timelapse and how the land has changed in 50 years.
Such shadows cast from the past into the present and from the present into the future in temporally twisted ways. This waste derives from many extraction and consumption places across the globe. This facility relieves the pressure of garbage piling up in other parts of the world.
The fly ash and other sorts of hazardous waste is transported to Langøya, a Norwegian island, and gapes out for this sort of special treatement in deep futures.
![IMG_0407[1].jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/0fb03d_4700da08801a446e97b3018ebfaef815~mv2.jpg/v1/crop/x_112,y_0,w_2912,h_3333/fill/w_290,h_332,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/IMG_0407%5B1%5D.jpg)
![IMG_0406[1].jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/0fb03d_ea886a9b24c849fa8d6449496578c8a9~mv2.jpg/v1/crop/x_57,y_0,w_3938,h_3024/fill/w_432,h_332,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/IMG_0406%5B1%5D.jpg)
“I know very well that I cannot
really influence the process which may lead to my ruin (like a volcanic eruption), but it
is nonetheless too traumatic for me to accept this, so I cannot resist the urge to do some-
thing, even if I know it is ultimately meaningless”
Žižek, S.. 2011. Living in the End Times. London: Verso
Sustainability does assume faith in a future, and also a sense of responsibility for ‘passing on’ to future generations a world that is liveable and worth living in. A
present that endures is a sustainable model of the future.
Braidotti, R. 2013. The Posthuman. London: Routledge.
(page 138)