The Geopolitics of Waste
Tracing extractivism and waste colonialism through research, culminating in interdisciplinary work between visual language and written production.
MARS3 · BRUSSEL · ENGLISH
teacher(s): Jeanne Autran-Edorh
field of interest: Art and Architecture · Politics · Research · Transformation · Adaptive Reuse
attitude: Critical · Reflective · Activist
method of inquiry: Research by Design · Mapping · Translation
design media: Narrative · Curatorial · Material-based
learning environment: Collective learning · Dialectic · Individual trajectory
study trip: No
Description
Contemporary ruins, labour exploitation, industrial overproduction, and waste colonialism are symptoms of a deeper structure: extractivism. This studio investigates waste not primarily as a material or design challenge, but as a lens onto the extractive relations that organise our world: the ongoing removal of resources, labour, and value from the global south to sustain overconsumption in the global north and rapidly industrialising economies.
Grounded in real world cases such as the e-waste dumps of Agbogbloshie, the textile mountains of Kantamanto, the Dandora dumpsite, and their echoes in Brussels’ own waste infrastructures, students choose a specific waste material, industrial or organic, and build their research around its geography, landscape, and policy, tracing how it moves, who governs it, and what territories and lives it reshapes along the way.
The studio’s centre of gravity lies in research and representation. Students are asked to develop rigorous inquiry into their chosen waste material and translate their findings into work situated between visual language and written production: mapping, graphic exploration and collage, installation, material assemblage and making, speculative or documentary writing, forms that hold space for complexity, position, and voice. The aim is not to solve waste, but to make its extractive logic visible, and in doing so, to question what relation architecture and design hold to it.
Key questions
How can architecture account for the extractive relations it depends on, rather than treating waste as an isolated design problem?
Can research itself be a form of architectural practice, rather than a preliminary step toward design?
What if the architect’s task were not always to design, but sometimes to witness, trace, and represent?
How can a single material (textile, e-waste, organic matter) reveal the geopolitics of an entire supply chain?
What if the studio’s final deliverable were not a design proposal, but a graphic and written body of evidence?
Position statement
This studio reframes waste as evidence of geopolitical and colonial power structures rather than a design or recycling problem. It holds that architecture cannot address waste through form or circularity alone, without first accounting for the inequalities between geographies, and the histories of extraction, labour, and dispossession that produce them. Research becomes the primary tool of design education here, positioning critical inquiry and representation as legitimate architectural practice in their own right.
Learning outcomes
Through sustained research into a chosen waste material, students develop insight into context analysis, problem sensitivity, and ethical engagement by tracing how extractivism and waste colonialism shape specific geographies, actors, and territories (1). Students formulate an individual research strategy, selecting a material and building an inquiry around its geopolitics, landscape, and governance, supported by mapping, critical discourse analysis, and site-grounded observation (2). Rather than structural principles in the conventional sense, students engage with the underlying systems, extractive, political, infrastructural, that structure waste flows and territorial inequality, building advanced understanding of these organising logics (3). Students employ interdisciplinary production, situated between visual language and writing, mapping, collage, installation, material assemblage, and text, as a mediating medium through which research becomes communicable, contestable, and publicly legible (4).
Expected deliverables
Written reflection · Publication · Material experiments · Architectural drawings · Exhibition