Conflictual Waste. Performance Art as Mediation Tool in the Work of M. Laderman Ukeles

In 1970 Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed the first national strike of Italian sanitation workers, sitting back and asking better treatment and recognition. Pasolini identified one of the many conflicts around urban solid waste: the one between the necessity of a removal chain and the repulsion surrounding it. Waste raises deep discomfort, identified by Lynch in the disturbing connections it holds with death, decay, consumption, and filth. The same discomfort surrounds waste management facilities and those close to waste, as sanitary workers or those relying on waste for daily support. At the same time, in the urban environment waste often becomes the weapon to fight social and political battles: practices as dumpster diving and freeganism are performed by citizens not accepting the status quo of individuals as customers and employing waste as tool to outline alternative consumption paths. The mediation of conflicts raised by waste is at the core of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ work, artist-in-residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation from 1977. Laderman Ukeles devoted her interest to the removal affecting waste and the oblivion around maintenance labour, working to foster awareness of public metabolism as the first step to deactivate conflicts caused by waste in the urban environment.