Marco Armiero and Justin McGuirk: Waste as Pedagogy

The spatial politics of waste- of disposal, of contamination, of spillage, of excess and of the social and structural manoeuvres taken to either contain or discharge - can teach us a lot about the fault lines on which our built environment rests. Continuing along the theme of Separation and Reparation, which commenced with Eyal Weizman’s talk on Repair Work and Communal Lifeworlds, we welcome environmental historian Marco Armiero and The Design Museum curator and Future Laboratory’s director Justin McGuirk to discuss the ways in which our bodies are simultaneously entangled-with and alienated-from matter through the biological and infrastructural architectures of waste. As an 'embodied stratigraphy of power and toxicity’, thinking with- and through the architectures of waste can help carve channels through which we may understand - and challenge - topologies of slow violence and geographies of injustice.

Since 2019 Marco Armiero is the president of the European Society for Environmental History, a recognition of his work in the field. Although rooted in that discipline, Marco developed a transdisciplinary research agenda blending environmental history with political ecology and environmental humanities. In 2013 he became the director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm making it a global player in that emerging field. His research clusters around three topics: environmental justice; migrations and the environment; and fascism and nature. Methodologically, Marco Armiero avoids any dichotomy between nature and society. Thematically, from toxicity to fascism, from migration to mountain communities, his research focuses on processes of expropriations and imposition of expert knowledge and the resistance of subaltern communities.

Justin McGuirk is the chief curator at the Design Museum and the director of Future Observatory, a new national programme supporting design research in achieving the UK’s environmental goals. In a diverse career, he has edited magazines, been a newspaper critic, founded a digital publishing imprint and curated high-profile exhibitions. He has lectured at universities and conferences around the world, and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Guardian, e-flux and numerous art and design journals. He is the author or editor of several books, including Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (Verso, 2014).

Separation & Reparation: the RCA School of Architecture Public Lecture Series 2022–23 is co-curated by Charlotte Grace & Thomas Aquilina.

Carrying the common wind of our Repossession and Co-liberation series from the past two years, the 2022–23 SoA Public Lecture Series looks to articulate*, in thought and form, the notions of Separation and Reparation.

We are all too familiar with Separation, the crucible of architecture's long exclusionary history. Now, as we seek to recover our past and reconcile our present, we look to Reparation for clarity. Akin yet distinct from Unity, from resolution, even from repair, Reparation asks us to build a world where exclusionary practices are no longer reproduced. This lecture series aims to foster a shared spatial language that can trace its contours and lay its foundations.

*Articulation itself stems from cutting or dividing, to break something down into related but distinct parts. Yet it also refers to clarification, to bring something into legibility. We must build our capacity to articulate separation and reparation in order to work in solidarity with social and spatial projects or emancipation.

Save the date:

Monday 15 May, 10am–1pm and 2–6pm
Mapping and Making Relationships
Workshop with Tonika Johnson

Tuesday 16 May, 6.30pm
Cartography, Methodology, Solidarity
Lecture by Tonika Johnson