Our project TRACEWASTE aims to observe and visualize movements of garbage to explore future urban life within the context of waste. We build an interactive audiovisual installation in order to distort the usual perception of and make visible the hidden dynamics within our disposing culture. We want to trigger a wide discussion and understanding of challenges and problems concerning our present global era of trash.

We conducted the following experiments: We monitored our waste (from a citizen’s perspective) by adding geolocation trackers to it. Using novel IoT devices on a low power wide area network for our tracking tasks enables us to collect data on a large scale. We monitored different kinds of waste (mostly plastics and textiles) to gain systematic knowledge not only of final resting locations of waste items, but also of transport durations, distances and emissions. We also capture the dynamics within an urban environment by monitoring 10 waste collection trucks inside Rome to get a further glimpse into urban garbage mobility. Our installation in the shape of an “island of waste” (“Müllinsel”) allows the interested public to explore all the data gathered in an interactive way. The overarching question remains: How to pave the way to “resilient waste mobility”?

In Collaboration with:
Design: Dimitrije Andrijevic
Sound Design: Sebastian Scholz
Coding: Max Pellert

Technology Partner: Paul Pinault, IngeniousThings

Advisors:
Armando Montanari, Florian Matzka, Gojer, HEB Hagen, Abfallwirtschaftsverband Lvt., AMA Roma

This Artwork is realized by Susi Gutsche and co-commissioned by Sony with the support of Vittorio Loreto, Alessandro Londei, Bernardo Monechi, Matteo Bruno and the S+T+ARTS program of the European Union in collaboration with MAXXI.

Repairing the Present received funding from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement LC01641664.

Susi Gutsche is an artist from Vienna currently based in Rome, Italy. She has a background in Social Design - Arts as Urban Innovation, the humanities and scientific laboratory work, participated in archeological excavations and worked in a clinical research setting in the past years.

In her works, she is mainly interested in the intersection and the overlap of art and everyday life. The focus of her previous projects lay on societal processes in urban contexts: Death, Isolation and (Bio)diversity; the Right to Green in cities, ground/soil sealing, allotments and participative processes.

She works with multiple media, such as video, photographic documentation, performance, casting and mold making, while experimenting with unconventional materials. Collecting images and objects is one of her primary research methodologies.