Basura: Cultures of Waste in Contemporary Spain

I had been living in Madrid on and off for seven years when an historic strike by garbage workers left the streets and metro tunnels looking like museums of refuse. I found treasures during the strike: wide oak beams that I turned into a bench, a typewriter, vintage chairs that needed just a bit of encouragement. It was an exciting – if aromatic – moment in Madrid that followed close on the tails of the 15-M occupy movement that settled in Madrid‘s central plaza for months, a raucous reaction to Pope Benedict's 2011 visit, and a steady stream of evictions and protests resulting from the crisis that lingered on for the better part of a decade after 2008. Spain felt as if it were on the cusp of big tumultuous political and cultural change, and then . . . trash. Samuel Amago‘s book Basura: Cultures of Waste in Contemporary Spain takes that garbage strike as a rhetorical jumping off point to explore the agency of discarded things in all their guises. In this work of what he defines as ‘cultural archaeology‘, he looks at garbage through the lenses of object-oriented ontology, vital materialism and Hispanic studies, asking hard and relevant questions about what a culture‘s trash says about its values, but also diving deep into the creative currents generated by our cultures of waste. The questions are relevant because, as Amago points out, ‘Trash will likely be one of humanity's greatest contributions to the geologic record‘ (9). Cataloguing art projects from Tenerife to Santo Domingo, his book looks at how artists have channelled the raw materials of waste to speak to their contemporaries. He looks at artists as diverse as Pedro Almodóvar and Ángeles Villarta, a journalist who went deep undercover in 1950ʹs Spain to see the lives of the trapaderos – garbage sorters who wandered the city at night – up close. Amago claims that trash, which is fast becoming a lasting symbol of the anthropocene, is the perfect filter through which to capture the values of the Anthropocene: