Thursday, June 27, 2013
D1.18B (Oudemanhuispoort)
This paper addresses the transformative potential of ruin-as-process and ruins-as-objects by focusing on material “waste” things, people’s life trajectories, and the related emotional positioning demanded of those interacting with waste every day. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork of informal waste collection (“scavenging”) in Sofia, Bulgaria, this paper explores the physicality of this type of waste work, the re-using of “ruined” materials, and the emotive and phenomenological sensibilities involved in and catalyzed by these social, economic, and material processes. In this paper we are introduced to Vetka, a 63-year-old Romani woman who has informally collected trash from city bins for years, after a slow descent stemming from losing her job as an office cleaner for the Bulgarian socialist import/export headquarters in 1991. Through the story of Vetka, her colleagues, her neighbors, and her family, this paper presents different kinds of collection in Sofia as a narrative of overlapping types of “ruin” that reveal a nexus of economic and political change, reactionary creativity, and emotional remediation.
