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Anthropocene and Solid Waste - Exploring the Heterogeneity of Municipal Landfills in South Korea

Speaker: Soyo Lee
Date: Tuesday, January 16, 2024 20:00 JST

In May 2022, a team of interdisciplinary researchers from the Center for Anthropocene Studies at KAIST, Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources, and Korea National University of Arts conducted a core boring excavation at a thirty-year-old unsanitary landfill site in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea to take an up-close look into the composition of this anthropogenic deposit. The samples were obtained as thirty-five cylinders, each of which is 1 meter in length and 5 centimeters in diameter, consisting of a wide variety of materials that are organic or inorganic, putrescible or imputrescible, and natural or artificial, as well as in different states of degradation and preservation.

While these samples are currently being investigated for microbiological and geological characteristics, they were also archived and fabricated into visual evidence by artists to be displayed in the context of fine arts and public science. This presentation shares the artist’s hands-on experience with the waste samples, focusing on the heterogeneity and diversity within the constructed assemblages of anthropogenic materials. Municipal solid waste is direct consequence of contemporary lifestyle and active component of our changing environment; however, its materiality is mostly hidden from public via physical and psychological barriers. Although our samples are tiny fragments of a specific ecological condition, getting in touch with their details allows for new speculations upon long-term cycling of materials.

For archiving and visualization, general geological and biological specimen preparation techniques were applied to the samples, along with 16S rRNA gene sequencing, scanning electron microscopy & energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and light microscopy for supplementary evidence.

About Soyo Lee

Soyo Lee is a visual artist working in the theme of natural history and life sciences in the modern transitional period in Korea. Soyo is a PhD in Electronic Art from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with interdisciplinary research on conservation and preservation of historical fluid-preserved human anatomy specimens. Her works have been shown at venues including MMCA Korea, Seoul Museum of Art, NJP Art Center and MCA Australia.