Wasting Time Zine

Welcome to the Wasting Time zine! Come with us on a journey that moves from deep history to the deep future, as we use speculative storytelling and creative practices to follow wastes and their processes, to bring different aspects of the Anthropocene into focus.

Why the zine

The three workshops of the Wasting Time project and the intervening conversations were rich in new ideas, connections and creativity. To highlight this, we chose to make a zine which reflected the richness of the project and celebrated its creative methodologies.

We hope the zine takes you on a visual journey through the workshops, sharing images from our activities, thought-provoking quotes from participants and overlaid, interwoven narratives about the concepts of Wasting Time. We encourage you to dive into the detail, following your nose on what stories speak to you: trusting the spontaneity of your interest is the guiding theme of collage, after all.

Content of the zine

To help you navigate the zine, here are a few sentences which describe each page:

p. 1-2: the three research questions of the Wasting Time Project

p. 3-10: Workshop 1, The Hidden Wastes Walk

• p. 3-4: walk around campus exploring the themes of hidden radioactive wastes in our immediate vicinity, what we do with wastes of waste, and exploring the future through speculative walking.
• p. 5-6: participants reactions to exploring the wastes hidden in plain sight in our present moment
• p. 7-8: from the present into the immediate future: how will the concept of the “Wasteocene” shape the next few decades? How will wastes break down into ecologies?
• p. 9-10: How long will it take our radioactive wastes to decay? Speculative futures, from fungal worlds to the realm of the dolphin people…

p. 11-20: Workshop 2, Hidden Wastes through Time

• p. 11-12: the workshop at the museum: what wastes get hidden over time? What are the tensions between preservation and waste in museum contexts?
• p. 13-14: Participant Collages
• p. 15-16: As Above, So Below: uncovering more-than-human bodies and stories compressed into geological deep time. How do timeframes and materialities of fossil fuel formation, extraction, and burning rub up against one another?
• p. 17-20: Participant Collages

p. 21: What Next? A summary of the conversations from Workshop 3 exploring where next we want to take our ideas, collaborations and creative practices.

p. 22: Bibliography: sources which guided our thinking, featured in the workshops, and pooled the knowledge of the group: a testament to rich interdisciplinary learning

Reflections on the zine making process

Mathilde:

My creative practice usually takes me outside, working with the elements of rock, bricks, wind and rain. Considering the project and our diverse workshops afresh through the lens of collage was an entirely new approach for me. Sam’s experience as a collage artist shone through, and she made it easy for me to dive in and have a play.

My main takeaway about zine-making is how powerful a tool it can be for processing ideas. For once, we weren’t writing a report and the use of imagery above that of words enabled me to think completely differently about what we’d done. A zine is a much more interpretive output, inviting readers into active participation to add their own layers of meaning. Moreover, it makes the words we have chosen to include all the more stark, poignant and fun.

Collage seems the perfect tool to summarise a project like Wasting Time, which was all about juxtaposing ideas which aren’t usually thought about together. In future projects, I would definitely advocate for making collages with the whole team as part of the methodology, in order to process ideas and learnings together in a creative manner, enabling us to make new connections and push the research further.

Sam:

I have created collages for artistic and research purposes for years, as a way to process my ideas, break down siloed knowledges, and allow disparate concepts to speak to one another. It provides me with the time and space to work through big concepts, identifying themes and physically arranging concepts into a more articulate narrative.

This was my first time working collaboratively with collage, and it has been a phenomenally enriching experience. Mathilde brought so much skill, knowledge, and curiosity to the process, and I am grateful to have worked with someone so open to exploring a different way of working. We had a lot of fun and creating something together, that brought together the participants contributions, felt really special.

It has also helped me reflect on what collage offers as a research method: the opportunity to generate and refine ideas in an embodied, creative, and collaborative way, to navigate and emotionally process complex problems, and tell more interconnected stories. I am excited to explore these questions further, and to hear what participants and readers draw out from the zine.