Waste
Future Folktales focused on East Tilbury in Essex, a site where issues of land contamination, radical utopias, and the movement of people and goods intersect.
The legacy of a hundred years of waste is coming back to haunt us, and coastal landfills are increasingly become exposed as a result of erosion, in particular along the Thames Estuary. This has an environmental impact on habitats and water quality, but also reveals a potential source of materials in a world where new resources become harder and more problematic to extract and move around the globe.
Although there is a growing technical expertise in the reduction of waste and re-use of materials, particularly in construction, the uptake of these methods is small, not enforced by regulation, and not high on the list of priorities of people affected by a harsh cost of living crisis and disconnected from the natural environment.
We need new ways of framing our approach culturally, and the studio has explored how we might create new narratives and rituals that allow us as a society of disparate individuals to adjust to living in the Anthrpocene, and collectively imagine a way to remediate the places we inhabit along with other species.
Future Folktales focused on East Tilbury in Essex, a site where issues of land contamination, radical utopias, and the movement of people and goods intersect.
Essex has been the site of a number of (failed) utopian projects - people fleeing East London to establish new communities round faith and socialism; model workers’ villages (Czech shoe-magnate Thomas Bata’s modernist housing) and a Tolstoyan naturist community. It is a site where the local meets the global– the container port, the site where the SS Windrush docked, and despite its slightly tawdry popular reputation, the county is also home to numerous stories and myths.
We worked with artists and scientists, using (and mixing) methodologies from both spheres to explore, test and propose.
