Found and Lost – A Genealogy of Waste?

In 1989, Kumiko Shimizu adorned the exterior of London’s Hayward Gallery with found objects – a wheel, a wheelbarrow, a typewriter, curious jewels of salvaged goods, the concrete structure grey façade popping with colourful urban barnacles. From the late 1990s onwards, over a ten year period, Tomoko Takahashi filled various galleries and museums (as well as a tennis court and abandoned office space), with their own discarded and neighbouring junk – from defunct computers to broken furniture – provoking questions of use and uselessness, productivity and waste. Between 1997 and 2005, Phaophanit / Oboussier made Atopia, an installation in two and three parts: outside, anti-pigeon devices cover a Berlin rooftop, an orderly and insistent deterrent. Inside, rubber oozes through galvanised steel shelving, slowing giving up its solidity. Across external and internal sites, imaginary bodies – avian and synthetic – are repelled and divided, expelled and dissolved. Later, an eponymous artists’ book inscribes their collaborative transitional encounters in/between Berlin, during a year spent away, abroad and adrift. From the scant traces of Shimizu and Takahashi works, to the tactical ‘absencing’ of Phaophanit / Oboussier practice, turning then to the latter’s studio and their accumulated archival remains, this paper ventures a tentative constellation and beginning-genealogy of waste and dust.

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