Trash as Culture - Culture as Trash

Trash as Culture uses garbage processing to re-imagine Beirut’s city center, while using the city center to reinterpret the pathway of trash. The shutdown of Beirut’s primary landfill in 2015 led to the accumulation of trash causing a crisis that would continue for months. Citizens were forced to live in distress, dealing with blocked roads, burnt trash, polluted water, and serious health risks. In retaliation, the #YouStink movement formed, uniting Lebanese citizens across political and religious boundaries. Protests went on to block roads, set objects on fire, and waste water. #YouStink protests took place in Martyrs’ Square, one of the city’s most historically significant public spaces that has witnessed centuries of urban, economic, and political transformation. It acts as an anchor for the ever changing city, while fueling growth and development. As a site of agency, Martyrs’ Square has hosted countless protests over the years. It is located in Beirut’s pristine central district, the only neighborhood that did not suffer from the impact of the trash crisis due to its highly efficient management and relatively wealthy tenants. Trash piled up all over the city, drawing a boundary around the square that hosted the angry protesters. Often known as the cultural capital of the Middle East, the crisis altered Lebanon’s standing to become known as the trash capital of the region, with news and gruesome images of the crisis appearing in media across the world within days. Trash as Culture explores the role of trash as it is blatantly and bluntly brought right into the city center, forcing an engagement with the city. The project deploys machinery and communal spaces to transform trash and the awareness and knowledge that surround it. The city of Beirut is re-imagined through the lens of the Anthropocene, putting the abrasive impact of waste center-stage. The exploration of a network of actors from the trucks to the machines, to the people, brands a new image of the city with trash now visibly at its core. Beirut becomes a city that embraces the waste it produces instead of burying it, thus drawing a new relationship between the urban environment and the landscape. While trash is collected from across the city and brought to be transformed, high tech education spaces within the structure revolutionize the relationship between the city and its excrement, and the people and their active role in creating and processing it. Beirut becomes a city experienced through its own trash, which it documents, leverages, and recreates.