An archaeologist and an artist walk into a dump…
For most of us, we throw our garbage to the curb, and it disappears from our lives. But to some, that’s just the beginning of trash’s story. In this episode, we follow two people who seek the truth in trash—an archaeologist who excavates ancient rubbish in Turkmenistan and an artist who spotlights the people responsible for making trash vanish.
Read the complete transcript below.
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Season 2 of Immaterial is made possible by Dasha Zhukova Niarchos. Additional support is provided by the Zodiac Fund.
Transcript
CAMILLE DUNGY: Today, we’re driving through Staten Island with our guide from the Parks department, Andy.
ANDY BLANCERO: My backseat is set up for my dogs. Let me reset it up for a human being.
DUNGY: He’s accompanied by Martina Rugiadi.
MARTINA RUGIADI: Hello, I’m Martina Rugiadi and I’m an Associate Curator in The Met, and I am an art historian and an archaeologist.
DUNGY: And artist sTo Len.
STO LEN: I’m an artist, investigator, waste enthusiast, connoisseur. I’ve been here a bunch of times.
DUNGY: We’ve invited them all to visit one of New York’s strangest landmarks.
ARCHIVAL NEWS REPORT: It’s near the water, you can feel the hot sun, and on a clear day you can even see the Twin Towers.
BLANCERO: This used to be a buffet for seagulls and rats and cockroaches and stuff like that.
ARCHIVAL NEWS REPORT: A man-made mountain of New York’s discarded yesterdays.
[MUSIC]
DUNGY: It’s…a massive landfill called Fresh Kills.
ARCHIVAL NEWS REPORT: It’s the world’s largest landfill dump! Three thousand acres of subway maps, bagels…
DUNGY: For over fifty years, this is where all of New York City’s trash came.
BLANCERO: Anything and everything that would have been put out to the curb and collected by a Department of Sanitation truck from 1948 until 2000, would be brought here to Fresh Kills.
DUNGY: That’s 150 million tons of solid waste in this one place. And the reason that we brought Martina and sTo here is that they both get really excited about trash. To them, trash isn’t a derogatory term. It’s a term of endearment.
RUGIADI: If I’m thinking of archaeological trash, I see treasure.
[MUSIC CUTS OUT]
RUGIADI: Like, it’s an archive of data.
DUNGY: Trash is a treasure trove of data. Data about a place. About people.
STO LEN: If you dig in someone’s trash, you’re gonna know about that person for sure. And you might know things that they don’t want you to know, but you know, what are those secrets?
Fresh Kills, these are huge mountains, and you’re walking on the mountain of garbage. And one day an archaeologist will dig in there to learn about us because the truth is always in the trash, right?
DUNGY: We’re not going to dig up hot dogs or subway maps from 1950 today. We’re just on our way to take a noninvasive look at the top of one of these monumental garbage mountains. So we drive up there, get out of the car, and make our way to the summit.
BLANCERO: We’re now standing at the top of North Mound, where we’ve got this beautiful panoramic view.
DUNGY: It looks very different from what you might imagine.
RUGIADI: This basically looks like a beautiful landscape, natural landscape with very strange pipes popping up from time to time.
DUNGY: We aren’t standing on a mountain of raw trash. We’re standing on a grassy hill. And those pipes…are gas wells used to capture and treat gasses from below. The trash itself still lays under this greenery, perfectly preserved. But it’s invisible. You can’t even smell it.
STO LEN: That’s what’s so interesting about places like this, because it’s what you don’t see. I think, you know, we have a culture that’s outta sight outta mind when it comes to garbage.
DUNGY: Take a moment to think about the trash you’ve generated just today. How much stuff you’ve thrown out during this past week. This past month. It’s almost impossible to keep track of the trail of waste we leave behind on a daily basis. For most of us, we throw our garbage to the curb, and it disappears from our lives. But after it’s picked up, our trash goes someplace. Fresh Kills used to be that place for all of New York City.
STO LEN: I think a lot about the labor, and talking to people who worked here when it was an operating landfill, like, God, the amount of work, they were accepting, I don’t know, thirty thousand tons a day? And managing, basically all of New York City’s waste for so long, is an incredible feat.
DUNGY: The story of trash is a story of people—of people who produce trash, of those who have to make it vanish…and of those who try to excavate it.
STO LEN: So when we’re all gone and aliens come to learn about humans, they’re going to totally come to Fresh Kills, right?
DUNGY: From The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I’m Camille Dungy, and this is Immaterial. This episode: how trash becomes activated into art.
—
DUNGY: In thinking through what that means, my team of producers got really into this idea called “Rubbish Theory.”
A cultural theorist named Michael Thompson coined this term. He wanted to explain how the status of an object as trash, or ‘rubbish,’ can transform over time. Say, you buy a new chair today. You love it. Perfectly fits your chic 2024 vibe.
Then, time passes, and you kinda grow tired of the chair. So you decide, it’s time to put this chair to the curb. And you throw it away.
For most of us, that’s where the chair’s lifecycle ends. As a piece of rubbish.
But Thompson argues the chair always has the potential to become something new. All the object needs is the touch of what he calls ‘some creative, upwardly mobile individual.’
A human being who can lift the object out of its current state and give it new importance. Someone with the Midas touch who can turn trash into treasure.
Some of those creative individuals are artists.
Take Chakaia Booker, an artist born in Newark, New Jersey. Booker scavenges city streets for old rubber tires.
And then…she takes them to her studio, where she cuts and shreds the tires, and transforms them into these hulking feathery sculptures.
One of these trash-sourced sculptures…is in The Met collection. It’s called Raw Attraction. The piece resembles a cross between a vulture’s winged body, and a blackened 3D model of a vulva.
Chakaia Booker (American, b. 1953). Raw Attraction, 2001. Rubber tire, steel, wood, 42 x 32 x 40 in. (106.7 x 81.3 x 101.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Hortense and William A. Mohr Sculpture Purchase Fund, 2001 (2001.413) © Chakaia Booker
Artists like Booker reactivate trash. They give discarded materials a new life.
[MUSIC]
But today, we’re focusing on a different type of creative individual: archaeologists like Martina Rugiadi.
Archaeologists are often responsible for excavating discarded materials from the past and making sense of them. Unlike artists, they do not physically manipulate these materials, but in studying and interpreting them, they give them new meaning.
RUGIADI: They acquire the value that we give them. So it’s kind of like from trash becomes something else…becomes an art object.
DUNGY: So why did we bring Martina to an ol’ dump? Martina has a bit of experience excavating sites that look similar to Fresh Kills.
The garbage mountain actually reminded her of something she encountered in Turkmenistan when she was there in 2019. All around her was flat desert landscape.
RUGIADI: You know, everything is flat, flat, flat.
DUNGY: And then, on the horizon:
RUGIADI: You start seeing very strange features.
DUNGY: A disruption in the landscape. A mound.
Archaeological mounds at the medieval walled town of Dandanakan in present-day Turkmenistan. Towns of the Karakum Archaeological Project (ToKa), 2019. Photo courtesy of D. Naskidashvili
RUGIADI: It’s very similar to this mound here at Fresh Kills.
DUNGY: But unlike Fresh Kills, this mound in Turkmenistan didn’t cover a trash heap. It covered an entire medieval city.
RUGIADI: The hill itself is the remains of multiple periods of life of the city. So when you climb on the top of the hill, you are walking on archaeological remains.
DUNGY: Through time, the city was abandoned and the sand and dirt around the city slowly buried it underground. Until it became a covered mound in the landscape.
This mound wasn’t a trash heap, but everything it contained eventually became trash. Left behind through time, the city, its objects, were buried.
Martina’s department at The Met, the Department of Islamic Art, excavated a lot of archaeological material from mounds in the early 1900s. And brought them to The Met.
RUGIADI: Archaeology as a discipline has a history that it’s closely connected to the history of museums, including of this museum. In the first half of the twentieth century, many museums in Europe and then in the U.S. started archaeological projects for different reasons. One of the reasons was to increase its collections in areas in which it was lacking objects.
DUNGY: The word archaeologist might summon up tropes of Indiana Jones-style figures adventuring around the world, digging at ancient sites in search of treasure.
Martina says that’s a romanticized Hollywood trope. But it is true that archaeologists in the past had a sort of ‘searching for treasure’ mentality. In the early twentieth century, they traveled around the world extracting aesthetically pleasing objects to bring to Western museums.
OLEG GRABAR (Archival tape): The Metropolitan sent an expedition to Nishapur in northeastern Iran.
Workers at the Falaki site, 1936
DUNGY: In the 1930s, The Met obtained a permit from the state of Iran to excavate a large medieval city that had been buried underground.
GRABAR: Home of the astronomer, mathematician, and poet, Omar Khayyam.
DUNGY: It was a center of scholarship, trade, and innovation along the Silk Road.
GRABAR: A farm and trade center for cotton, fruit, and grain.
DUNGY: And the priority at Nishapur in the 1930s was to find objects to expand the Museum’s collection of Islamic art. They prioritized objects that were complete and more aesthetically pleasing.
RICHARD ETTINGHAUSEN (Archival tape): There are thousands of objects to choose from and it has to be beautiful, it has to tell a story. And only then you can start with the problem of acquiring it in a serious manner.
Top: Workshop at the Nishapur excavation house, with many Met ceramics, 1930s Bottom: Workshop at the Nishapur excavation house, with several architectural fragments, 1947
DUNGY: If you look at the collection, there’s a bowl with floral and geometric designs that seem to have been splashed across the surface like slow moving water.
Bowl with Green, Yellow, and Brown Splashed Decoration, 10th century. Iran, Nishapur. Earthenware, H. 2 7/8 in. (7.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1938 (38.40.137)
A ninth-century stone oil lamp. An incredibly detailed fragment of a stucco panel. And more beautiful pitchers and drinking vessels than I can describe.
Left: Stone Oil Lamp, 9th century. Iran, Nishapur. Steatite, 1 3/8 x 9 7/8 x 4 7/8 in. (3.5 x 24.9 x 12.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1938 (38.40.116) Right: Painted Dado Panels, 9th century. Iran, Nishapur. Stucco, 40 3/8 x 53 1/2 x 2 in. (102.6 x 135.9 x 5.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1940 (40.170.176)
The collection has shaped how scholars think about medieval Islamic art at large.
GRABAR: Nishapur forms the base of one of America’s most important collections.
DUNGY: While archaeologists of the time did have real scholarly interest in people’s lives in the past, the goal of art museums was one that prioritized beautiful objects. They wanted intricately crafted ceramics. They wanted timeless wall paintings, architectural decorations.
But pretty objects don’t always tell the most accurate stories. Think of the fanciest things you own. A piece of jewelry. China cups. They might be the nicest things you have, but they’re not the things that most define your day-to-day existence.
Think of the things you do use and abuse on the regular.
Your mud-strewn sneakers. Your red winter jacket. Objects you may eventually throw in the trash.
Those objects have a lot more to say about you, where you’re from, where you’ve been, than the ones you keep stored away in a closet.
When museums in the past focused only on the most aesthetically pleasing objects, they missed that part of the story.
RUGIADI: Our understanding of what happened is filtered through someone’s decision who had very different ideas of what was important of knowing in the past. Archaeologists today are more interested in how people lived in the past. How they made things. Why? What was their environment? What they were eating? Why were they eating those things? What was their climate at the time?
DUNGY: By looking at medieval trash with a different mindset, Martina could answer those questions.
So she initiated an archaeological project at a medieval city called Dandanakan in Turkmenistan. That’s where Martina saw the mound she mentioned earlier on.
Aerial view of archaeological mounds at Dandanakan. ToKa, 2019. Photo courtesy of D. Naskidashvili
For this project, her team would work collaboratively with archaeologists in Turkmenistan, and all the objects they uncovered would remain in the country.
At the site, Martina had her eyes peeled for discarded objects that weren’t necessarily pretty to look at.
On her hunt for these traces of the past, she wasn’t alone.
In the past, archaeologists had hundreds of people on site, but Martina was there with a small international team assembled by The Met alongside a team of Turkmen archaeologists and workmen.
In addition to professional archaeologists, they had:
RUGIADI: A conservator. A specialist of photogrammetry and 3D renderings, an architect, and an archaeobotanist.
EMMA VECCHIONE (Producer): Wait, what’s an archaeobotanist?
DUNGY: That’s producer Emma Vecchione.
RUGIADI: An archaeobotanist is someone who studies the organic remains of the past.
DUNGY: Ancient plant remains. Once the team arrived in Turkmenistan, they set up tents and got to work.
RUGIADI: Fieldwork is a very intense moment of your life. You work almost 24 hours. So you basically live all together. You leave where your storage is, where your excavated finds are. You come back from a morning of excavation and then you have lunch, go back to sleep, and then you have a whole, evening and night to work on the documentation of what you have excavated.
The team at work in the trench where they discovered the “toilet” pits in Dandanakan. ToKa, 2023. Photo by Martina Rugiadi
DUNGY: When Martina began excavating with her team, they discovered a lot of interesting objects. They uncovered a gorgeous mihrab from a mosque, some intricately crafted ceramics, fragments of stucco wall panels… Any of these could’ve been the highlight of a successful dig.
But for Martina, our resident archaeologist of trash, the most memorable discovery was an unusual one.
[MUSIC]
DUNGY: One day, her colleague was working in a trench when he called out to her. He found something.
RUGIADI: And so I get there and they are showing me what looks like a well, something like a very deep pit that goes down.
DUNGY: They didn’t know what the pit was so they made a note of it and moved on. But then soon after, they called her again.
RUGIADI: There’s a second pit like that. Exactly with the same configuration, with the same bricks. And then I don’t remember if it was the same day, the afternoon or another day. We had a third one, and we realized that they were in line.
DUNGY: Three mysterious pits. In three separate rooms. They wanted to investigate them more, but they were empty, deep, dark holes. Twenty-two feet deep.
RUGIADI: So it’s a bit scary and you definitely cannot go inside. Although to really understand what it is, you need to go inside. You need to investigate what is there.
DUNGY: They didn’t know what was at the bottom of these pits, what they were used for, but Martina wondered if there might be something informative there.
RUGIADI: After we realized that these three pits were connected, we started thinking on how to sample the soil that was on the very bottom of it.
DUNGY: They built a makeshift claw grabber and used it to scrape the bottom of the hole…and they found what they had been looking for all that time: dirt.
RUGIADI: When you collect soil, it looks like soil. We get excited…but, it looks just like soil.
DUNGY: The archaeobotanist, Lorenzo Castellano, takes the sample and looks at it under the microscope. And he discovers something peculiar.
RUGIADI: So at a certain point, Lorenzo calls me and it’s like, you’ll want to see this.
DUNGY: He tells her: “I think we might just have found sewage. Medieval sewage.”
RUGIADI: And I was like, how can you prove this?
DUNGY: He says he found several seeds in the soil, from edible plants, such as melon and grape. And when he observed them closely, he noticed that they were mineralized, in other words the organic matter was replaced by phosphate and mineral deposits.
Mineralized seeds excavated from a toilet that Martina Rugiadi and her team discovered on an archaeological project in the medieval town of Dandanakan. ToKa, 2023. Courtesy of L. Castellano
DUNGY: He knew there was only one place this might’ve come from: someone’s butt.
RUGIADI: It was a very exciting moment.
DUNGY: The three deep pits were likely a series of toilets. They appeared aligned because they were most likely part of a connected sewage system. This was about as far away from the beautiful objects to bring back to the Museum as you could possibly get.
Photogrammetry of the excavated rooms and the street. The rectangular black slits are toilets that Martina Rugiadi and her team discovered (two on one side of the street, one on the other side of it). ToKa, 2023. Courtesy of P. Wordsworth
Stuff like this is not pretty to look at. But…discoveries like these…help archaeologists paint a fuller picture of the history of this region.
RUGIADI: So you can have a sense of what are the fruit and vegetables that are being eaten in a specific time, it tells us about diet, the climate, the agriculture, trade. It really opens up what kind of infrastructure people had in their everyday lives.
DUNGY: Martina told sTo Len this story back at Freshkills.
STO LEN: So you went digging in the toilets. What did you find?
RUGIADI: From the researcher point of view, what we really hope to find are organic remains of what people were eating, basically. So what you expect to find in sewage. And occasionally, I’m sure that you might have finds of little objects that either fell into the pit or were trashed in there, so broken stuff.
STO LEN: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting because now we make these archives everywhere, these landfills. So, yeah, your job will be easier in the future.
RUGIADI: It’s really easy. Like, one of the things that really, you know, when I think of myself as an archaeologist, and think of what we are looking at. We have this approach of cataloging everything. It is an archive, but it is us who create the archive in the moment in which we label it.
DUNGY: This all leads me to wonder: What will archaeologists of the future learn about us from the waste archives of New York City? That’s coming up after the break.
—
STO LEN: Come on in.
[DOOR SLAMS]
SALMAN AHAD KHAN (Producer): I love a good door bang.
DUNGY: That’s our friendly trash connoisseur, sTo Len with our producer, Salman Ahad Khan. We’re deep in Queens in a massive garage space that looks like an airplane hangar.
STO LEN: I’m always finding studios in some of the least likely places. Sanitation garages, storage units, botanical gardens, wherever I can find a little nook to work.
DUNGY: We’re here because sTo is the perfect person to answer my question: What stories will archaeologists of the future find in the waste WE leave behind?
sTo has been thinking about this question for a long time.
STO LEN: My interest in trash goes all the way back into childhood, you know, I think I was always interested in detritus and, you know, one of the cool places to hang out in my hometown was the dump.
You would just sort of see all of these random things that people were just kind of dumping and getting rid of. But, if you wanted to find stuff to make things with, that was a great free store basically for art materials and toys.
DUNGY: He grew up around Washington, D.C. where he would often visit the Smithsonian American Art Museum to see his favorite artwork—a sculpture by the mid-twentieth-century artist, James Hampton.
Consisting of about 180 individual parts, the monumental piece that kept sTo coming back is known as The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly.
James Hampton (American, 1909–1964). The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly, ca. 1950–1964. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, Gift of anonymous donors (1970.353.1-.116)
It’s massive. A cushioned throne sits in the middle, surrounded by objects that look like they’re covered in silver and gold. Crowns. Ornately decorated pedestals. Winged plaques that look like enormous golden butterflies.
STO LEN: It’s this beautiful sculpture, mostly made out of tin foil and cardboard.
DUNGY: That’s the thing that most fascinated sTo… Hampton’s astonishing throne is made entirely of discarded materials. Hampton used tossed aside objects he found in his neighborhood, like old furniture, jelly jars, and materials like lightbulbs and discarded purple paper from the federal building where he worked as a janitor during the day.
sTo Len was inspired by this work. He himself became an artist and connoisseur of trash. But instead of literally sculpting trash in his art, sTo creates conceptual videos, prints, writings, and performances that meditate on rubbish.
In 2021, he even got a job with the New York City Department of Sanitation as their Artist-in-Residence. He started at Sanitation HQ at 125 Worth Street. He wanted to spend some time with the people doing the hard work of hauling trash in the U.S.’s largest waste management department. So one day, he woke up at 4 am. And followed a sanitation crew as they went through their day. And he wasn’t following just any sanitation crew, he was following the guys who picked up his own trash.
STO LEN: I wanted to ride around with the actual people who pick up my garbage. So I rode around with Frank and Egan, super nice guys, and we go around and do our neighborhood. We do my block, we do my own garbage.
Photo courtesy of sTo Len
What was so fascinating was riding around my own neighborhood with those guys, they know a lot about the neighborhood. They know who’s just moved in and who moved out, who had a baby. Who likes to eat McDonald’s. You see a lot about people through what they throw out. And sometimes you find out stuff you don’t want to know, you know?
But a lot of times you find out just what makes up a people, right? Because essentially trash, as bad as it is, that did sustain us. It’s like proof of existence. We exist. We waste, you know? I mean, waste is gonna come outta your body.
So much of the Sanitation force is invisible, I would say. I wish everyone could ride around with their personal Sanitation workers.
‘Cause now when I put out garbage, I'm like, Frank and Egan are gonna pick this up. You know? I'm like double wrapping it, I’m making sure it’s not too heavy. I’m going in my neighbor’s garbage and making sure it’s not too heavy. There’s nothing sharp sticking out. ‘Cause these are people that I know and like. These are my friends who are actually gonna come pick it up.
Seeing the literal labor of Sanitation made such an impression on me, you know? And yeah, you could think about it, but until you’re there and people are having to lift all this crazy stuff and stick it in there and then it squeezes it and all this garbage juice comes shooting out of the back of the truck and, you have to dodge it to not get hit in the face by it… That's a visceral experience that you’re never gonna forget.
DUNGY: After seeing the work up close, sTo was determined to try and document the history of this integral department and its employees. He set up camp in a repair shop run by the department in Woodside, Queens.
While he was browsing through the facility, he stumbled upon a huge screen printing shop that had been inactive for decades.
STO LEN: It was great to literally turn the lights on. It was like totally dark and dormant when I found it.
DUNGY: And as he started to get the old shop running again, he found fifty years worth of old screens used to print Department of Sanitation signs.
STO LEN: These are screens that still had the old designs that had been used for the past fifty years. So these are designs that say, “Don't litter please,” with like broken bottles and cans, or, “Brooklyn supports clean streets and clean beaches.” And as an artist, I was really interested in the visual language of sanitation. You know, how are they telling people over and over for the last fifty years basically the same stuff. Don’t litter, pick up your dog’s poop. Let’s try to keep our streets and beaches clean.
Photo courtesy of Walter Wlodarczyk
DUNGY: And so he decided to create his own mashups of that history.
STO LEN: I was starting to put together the pieces of the visual history of sanitation and how they were creating these messages, basically by cleaning up this space and then repurposing the signs themselves.
DUNGY: He met the painters who create all the signage and paint the trucks today, and he showed them how to operate the old screen printing machine.
Photo courtesy of Walter Wlodarczyk
And as he started getting to know more and more people, they also got to know him. They started showing him all kinds of things from the department’s past. They knew he was fascinated by discarded stuff.
STO LEN: I found so much stuff in the screen printing shop, and so someone mentioned, oh, have you been in the TV studio? And I was like, the TV studio?!
DUNGY: To sTo’s surprise, in the same building, a few stories above, there was a discarded TV studio fully equipped with all sorts of film and video equipment.
Photo courtesy of Walter Wlodarczyk
He rummaged through the boxes there and found abandoned film cans and tapes. The department had no way of playing these anymore so no one knew what was in them. sTo intervened, thinking, wait, there might be something valuable here.
STO LEN: So I began digitizing it all, and I, I wound up digitizing, I think around five hundred hours of the footage.
Photo courtesy of Walter Wlodarczyk
DUNGY: And as he was digitizing, he found a remarkable history of the city unfolding across the footage.
STO LEN: So in the footage you actually get to see New York City getting built. A lot of New York City is built on trash.
ARCHIVAL NEWS REPORT: If you’re feeling down in the dumps, have I got a tour for you. It’s near the water, you can feel the hot sun, and on a clear day you can even see the Twin Towers, and it’s in Staten Island. Welcome to the city’s largest garbage dump.
DUNGY: In these old videos of Fresh Kills that sTo uncovered, a newscaster gives a tour of the landfill that shows a view of the Twin Towers. But after 9/11, the debris from the towers was taken to Fresh Kills. That would be the final deposit made on Fresh Kills before it closed.
Fresh Kills today mostly looks like a regular park. Our history…neatly hidden away under layers of foliage and leachate. The chapter of this site as a landfill is now complete.
BLANCERO: So for millions of New Yorkers for decades, their trash went away, uh, but for hundreds of thousands of Staten Islanders, the trash came here, you know?
DUNGY: Andy, our Parks department tour guide, gets it. Both conceptually and literally. He’s a Staten Islander.
BLANCERO: And I think that now we’re looking at this as a collective project. That has been worked on, knowingly or unknowingly by millions of New Yorkers over decades. They didn’t realize they were building what will be the largest park in New York City. But that is what we’re standing on.
STO LEN: It’s a social sculpture.
BLANCERO: Social sculpture! Love that.
STO LEN: We created it, you know, like in all its facets and we’re still creating it, you know, in other places, right?
I also think about how New York City exports all our garbage. So even though it’s not here anymore or if it’s not in New York City, it’s going to Virginia, it’s going to Ohio, so now these other landfills are being created in other places.
I can’t not think about all that. It’s just like multiplying, multiplying, you know, and it’s overwhelming to think about how that’s happening every day. I mean, it’s interesting because now we make these archives everywhere, these landfills. So, yeah, your job will be easier in the future.
DUNGY: Just as archaeologists of today, like Martina, stumble upon fragments from the past, future Martinas might one day dig into Freshkills, wonder about the lives of New Yorkers past, and try to piece together their stories by uncovering what lies underneath the lush, green park it has now become.
Excavating these kinds of remnants provides a valuable lens on how people have lived through time.
Though we might prefer to ignore it, though it isn’t necessarily pretty…our legacy comes down to what might be seen as trash some day.
It’s what remains…when all else…has faded away.
—
Immaterial is produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise.
Our production staff includes Salman Ahad Khan, Ann Collins, Samantha Henig, Eric Nuzum, Emma Vecchione, Sarah Wambold, and Jamie York.
Additional staff includes Laura Barth, Julia Bordelon, Skyla Choi, Maria Kozanecka, and Rachel Smith.
This season would not be possible without Andrea Bayer, Inka Drögemüller, and Douglas Hegley.
Sound design by Ariana Martinez and Kristin Mueller.
This episode includes original music composed by Austin Fisher.
Fact-checking by Mary Mathis and Claire Hyman.
Special thanks to Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong and Avery Trufelman.
Immaterial is made possible by Dasha Zhukova Niarchos. Additional support is provided by the Zodiac Fund.
This episode would not have been possible without Associate Curator Martina Rugiadi, sTo Len, and Andy Blancero.
And special thanks to Associate Curator Brinda Kumar, and Curator Navina Haider.
To learn more about this episode and see pictures of artworks discussed, visit The Met’s website at metmuseum.org/immaterialtrash.
I’m your host, Camille Dungy.
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This episode’s cover art is a detail from Shomei Tomatsu’s Untitled.
Shomei Tomatsu (Japanese, 1930–2012). Untitled, 1987–89, printed 1992. Silver dye bleach print, 23 x 23 in. (58.4 x 58.4 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1993 (1993.252.1) © Shomei Tomatsu
