Temporal Walkshop

This digital walkshop will introduce you to the temporal geography of our case-study of the project "Checking in with Deep Time" at the incineration plant at Gärstad in Linköping - mid Sweden adapted to an online exhibition by the project "Curating Time". The exhibition investigates what times and temporalites are in the making here. What temporal contradictions and paradoxes do we live with in this situated place? What processes could one tune into in better ways for to alter the making of garbage futures?

The plant is located by the motorway - the E4 - that stretch from the north of Sweden in Haparanda to the extreme south in Trelleborg and it is a part of the huge European system of highways.

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To this very place garbage is transported by trucks from several other places in Europe. This means that there is a well connected European temporal choreography, where lorrydrivers are coordinating their lives towards their companies schedules and have to make their involvement in the garbage economy their priority. Their life-time is bought to keep these wheels turning and to turn their attention to the handling of garbage, and they are in this way entangled in global hierarchies of time and labour.

There is a flow of waste into this place - truck after truck pour materials into the industrial buildning. This waste derives from many places in northwestern Europe, such as Britain and Norway. This facility relieves the pressure of garbage piling up in other parts of the world and assist them to keep their quotes of garbage per year. Garbageflows are choreographed by the structures of accountability and new public managment.

The building themselves are high-tech and slot into the modernistic period. At the same time, the sedimentation of microplastic, fly ash, concrete & technofossils, produce the material layers that suggests geologists we are in the anthropocene epoch - this very temporal slot - where actions today overshoot into the life-space of future generations.

The garbage is transported into one of several furnaces - they are the belly of the beast - that speed up material processes of decay and turn firmer materials into heath and also condence others. The churning over produce both heath for the homes of Linköping - but also fly ash - that is considered as hazardous waste.

The plant is spreading out over an area rich in archaeological remains. At the small rise just in front of the yellow plant several formations of stone were located & excavation revealed graves and the remains of burned bodies from the Pre-Roman Iron Age. They have now been removed to make place for future expansion.

There were artefacts such as 5 celtic torques found. Many of these metal items, have been conserved to stop their decay. This is really, to slow down material time and at the same time projects their working into futures, with expected museums. With this archaeology there are tension of saving for the future and letting go.

There are also times of waiting, storage, keeping and care - that produce their own temporal relations and paces. The garbaged is packed in mint coloured plastic bales and stacked, waiting for other processes to take place. It is milled, heaped, tended to and shifted with heavy machinery in what could be called a care for the waste-process.

Also people from around Linköping use Gärstad as a recycling station. Refuse from renovation as well as superfluous home appliances and toys can be found.

Vernacular garbage temporalities evolve around daily cycles of bin use, garbage sorting and can be added to by trips to the recycling facilities.

A sign left on the site says "Now the misery continues"

Living matters

Encounters with Deep Time environments

Temporal Walkshop

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