A walk in and around drains and dumps

The catalyst for the walk was the death of two manual scavengers in a pothole, adding to a list of growing absurd obituaries of workers dying in the city’s underbelly.

Olfactory chambers of ward 88 was a protest against the mainstream discourse around garbage. Garbage has become a ‘civic issue’, the main preoccupation of municipal authorities, government officials and citizens alike. Newspaper headlines shriek daily of the grotesque apparition that mars the city’s modern image. Absent from most reports on garbage, however, are the conditions and lived realities of the workers who work invisibly. The journey of the garbage bag only begins once it is placed outside the door. Who collects it, where is it carried, who sifts through the piles, early in the morning, in the dead of the night?

Olfactory chambers of ward 88 was a walk rooted in the labour practices involved in garbage collection and disposal. An effort to create linkages between past and present, to foreground tenuous histories that political campaigns seek to obliterate. To listen to the story of the old man with the rake, the woman with the broom, the hands in the dump. To get a glimpse of the city that floats, gurgles silently behind paved concrete, to travel to the outskirts of the city to landscapes made of waste.

The walk was led by odour.