Fatberg Under Barclays

Symposium presentation on new research in progress, including extracts of film screenings.

The presentation departs from Weir’s previous work (Pazugoo), burying objects underground as long-term markers of nuclear waste, and writing around burial and ancestrality by philosopher Elizabeth Povinelli. It proposes a fatberg under One Aldgate as mass anonymous collective burial process, the inheritance and hidden underside of waste products of capitalism, flushed as preservation. Against an ideology of digital immateriality, it is twisted body horror as memorial practice, a more-than-human archive which may or may never be unearthed. Defined through its flows and blockages, it acts as dark mirror to financial data flows above the surface.

Weir presents work in the form of ritualistic offerings to the fatberg, paranoid mapping of offshore finance (through the figure of the Armadillo), an encounter with a discarded meteorite scrap, and a music genre (for an un-named bank) vaporising waste through generative AI.