Today, we're driving through Staten Island with our guide from the Parks Department, Andy. My Maxita set up for my dogs. Let me reset it up for a human being. Yeah. He's accompanied by Martina Rujadi. Hello, I'm Martina Rujadi. I'm a associate curator in the Met, and I'm an artist, a natural artist. An artist, a stow, a lid. I'm an artist, an investigator, a waste, enthusiast, a connoisseur. I've been here a bunch of times. We've invited them all to visit
one of New York's strangest landmarks. It's near the water, you can feel the hot sun, and on a clear day you can even see the twin towers. This used to be a buffet for seagulls and rats and cockroaches and stuff like that. The man made mountain of New York's discarded yesterdays. It's a mass of landfill called fresh kills. It's the world's largest landfill dump. 3,000 acres of dead subway map. Fagled. For over 50 years,
this is where all of New York City's trash came. Anything and everything that would have been put out to the curb and collected by a Department of Sanitation truck from 1948 until 2000 would be brought here to fresh kills. That's 150 million tons of solid waste in this one place. And the reason that we brought Martina and Stowe here is that they both get really excited about trash. To them, trash isn't a derogatory term. It's a term of endearment.
I'm thinking of a biological trash. I see treasure. It's like it's an archive of data. Trash is a treasure trove of data. Data about a place about people. If you dig in someone's trash, you're going to know about that person for sure. And you might know things that they don't want you to know. But what are those secrets?
Fresh kills. These are huge mountains. And you're walking on the mountain of garbage and one day an archaeologist will dig in there to learn about us because the truth is always in the trash. Right? We're not going to dig up hot dogs or subway mats from 1950 today. We're just on our way to take a non-invasive look at the top of one of these monumental garbage mountains. So we drive out there, get out of the car, and make our way to the summit.
We're now standing at the top of North Mound where we've got this beautiful panoramic view. It looks very different from what you might imagine. It basically looks like a beautiful, you know, natural landscape with very strange pipes popping up from time to time. We aren't standing on a mountain over our trash. We're standing on a grassy hill. And those pipes are gas wells used to capture and treat gases from below.
The trash itself still lays under this greenery perfectly preserved, but it's invisible. You can't even smell it. That's what's so interesting about places like this because it's what you don't see. I think, you know, we have a culture that's out of sight of mine when it comes to garbage. Take a moment to think about the trash you've generated just today. How much stuff you've thrown out during this past week, this past month.
It's almost impossible to keep track of the trail of ways we leave behind on a daily basis. For most of us, we throw our garbage to the curb and it disappears from our lives. But after it's picked up, our trash goes someplace. Fresh kills used to be that place for all of New York City. I think a lot of it, the labor, I think, and talking to people who worked here when it was an operating landfill like, God, the amount of work. They were accepting, I don't know, 30,000 tons a day.
And managing basically all of New York City's waste for so long is an incredible feat. The story of trash is a story of people. Of people who produce trash, of those who have to make it vanish. And of those who try to excavate it. So when we're all gone, an alien's come to learn about humans, they're going to totally come to fresh shells, right? From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I'm Camille Dunci, and this is immaterial. This episode, how trash becomes activated into art.
In thinking through what that means, my team of producers got really into this idea called rubbish theory. A cultural theorist named Michael Thompson coined this term. He wanted to explain how the status of an object is trash or rubbish can transform over time. Say you buy a new chair today. You love it. It perfectly fits your Sikh 2024 vibe. Then time passes and it can grow tired of the chair. So you decide it's time to put this chair to the curb and he throw it away.
For most of us, that's where the chair's life cycle ends as a piece of rubbish. But Thompson argues, the chair always has the potential to become something new. All the object needs is the touch of what he calls some creative, upwardly mobile individual. A human being who can lift the object out of its current state and give it new importance. Someone with the minus touch who can turn trash into treasure.
Some of those creative individuals or artists take Chakaya Booker, an artist born in Newark, New Jersey. Booker scavenges city streets for old rubber tires. And then she takes them to her studio where she cuts and shreds the tires and transforms them into these hulking, feathery sculptures. One of these trash-sourced sculptures is in the Met collection. It's called Raw Attraction. The piece resembles a cross between a vultures-winged body and a blackened 3D model of a vulva.
Artists like Booker reactivate trash. They give discarded materials a new life. But today, we're focusing on a different type of creative individual. Archaeologists like Martina Rujati. Archaeologists are often responsible for excavating discarded materials from the past and making sense of them. Unlike artists, they do not physically manipulate these materials, but in studying and interpreting them, they give them new meaning.
They acquire the value that we give them, so it kind of like from trash becomes something else, becomes an art object. So, why did we bring Martina to an old dump? Martina has a bit of experience excavating sites that look similar to fresh skills. The garbage mountain actually reminded her of something she encountered in Turkmenistan. When she was there in 2019, all around her was flat desert landscape. You know, everything is flat, flat, flat.
And then, on the horizon, you start seeing very strange features. A disruption in the landscape. A mound. It's very similar to this mound here at fresh kills. But unlike fresh kills, this mound in Turkmenistan didn't cover a trash heap. It covered an entire medieval city. The hill itself is the remains of multiple periods of life of the city. So when you climb on the top of the hill, you are walking on archaeological remains.
Through time, the city was abandoned and the sand and dirt around the city slowly buried it underground. Until it became a covered mound in the landscape. This mound wasn't a trash heap, but everything it contained eventually became trash. Left behind through time, the city, its objects were buried. Martina's department at the Met, the Department of Islamic Art, excavated a lot of archaeological material from mounds in the early 1900s. And brought them to the Met.
Archaeology as a discipline has a history that it's closely connected to the history of museums, including of this museum. In the first half of the 20th century, many museums in Europe and then in the US started archaeological projects for different reasons. One of the reasons was to increase its collections in areas in which it was lacking objects.
The word archaeologist might summon up tropes of Indiana, Jones style figures, adventuring around the world, digging up ancient sites in search of treasure. Martina says that's a romanticized Hollywood trope. But it is true that archaeologists in the past had a sort of searching for treasure mentality. In the early 20th century, they traveled around the world, extracting aesthetically pleasing objects to bring to Western museums.
The Metropolitan sent an expedition to Nishapur in northeastern Iran. In the 1930s, the Met obtained a permit from the state of Iran to excavate a large medieval city that had been buried underground. Whom of the astronomer, mathematician and poet Omar Hayam? It was a center of scholarship, trade and innovation along the Silk Road. A farm and trade center for cotton fruit and grain. And the priority at Nishapur in the 1930s was to find objects to expand the museum's collection of Islamic art.
They prioritized objects that were complete and more aesthetically pleasing. There are thousands of objects to choose from and it has to be beautiful, it has to tell a story and only then you can start with the problem of acquiring it in a serious manner.
If you look at the collection, there's a bowl with floral and geometric designs that seem to have been splashed across a surface like slow moving water, a ninth century stone oil lamp, an incredibly detailed fragment of a stucco panel, and more beautiful pictures and drinking vessels than I can describe. The collection has shaped how scholars think about medieval Islamic art at large. Nishapur formed the base of one of America's most important collections.
While archaeologists at the time did have real scholarly interests in people's lives in the past, the goal of art museums was one that prioritized beautiful objects. They wanted intricately crafted ceramics, they wanted timeless wall paintings, architectural decorations. But pretty objects don't always tell the most accurate stories. Think of the fanciest things you own, a piece of jewelry, china cups.
They might be the nicest things you have, but they're not the things that most define your day-to-day existence. Think of the things you do use and abuse on the regular. Your mud-strian sneakers, your red-winner jacket. Objects you may eventually throw in the trash. Those objects have a lot more to say about you, where you're from, where you've been, than the ones you keep stored away in a closet.
When museums in the past focus only on the most aesthetically pleasing objects, they miss that part of the story. Our understanding of what happened, then, it's filtered through someone's decision who had very different ideas of what was important of knowing in the past. archaeologists today are more interested in how people lived in the past. How they made things, why, what was their environment, what they were they eating, why were they eating those things, what was their climate at the time.
By looking at medieval trash with a different mindset, Martina could answer those questions. So she initiated an archaeological project at a medieval city called Dundana Khan, in Turkmenistan. That's where Martina saw the mound she mentioned earlier on. For this project, her team would work collaboratively with archaeologists in Turkmenistan, and all the objects that they uncovered would remain in the country.
At the site, Martina had her eyes peeled for discarded objects that weren't necessarily pretty to look at. On her hunt for these traces of the past, she wasn't alone. In the past, archaeologists had hundreds of people on site, but Martina was there with a small international team assembled by the Met alongside a team of Turkmen, archaeologists and workmen.
In addition to professional archaeologists, they had... A conservator, a specialist of photogrammetry and three de-rendering, an architect and archae botanist. Wait, what's an archaeobot? That's producer Emma Vekioni. Now, a cobotan is someone who studies the organic remains of the past. Ancient plant remains. Once the team arrived in Turkmenistan, they set up tents and got to work.
The work is a very intense moment of your life. You work almost 24 hours. So you basically live altogether. You live where your storages, where your excavated finds are. You come back from a morning of excavation and then you have lunch, go back to sleep, and then you have a whole evening and night to work on the documentation of what you have excavated. When Martina began excavating with her team, they discovered a lot of interesting objects.
They uncovered a gorgeous mithraub from a mosque, some intricately crafted ceramics, fragments of stucco wall panels, any of these could have been the highlight of a successful dig. But for Martina, our resident archaeologist of trash, the most memorable discovery was an unusual one. One day her colleague was working in a trench when he called out to her. He found something. And so I get there and they are showing me what looks like a well, something like a very deep pit that goes down.
They didn't know what the pit was, they made a note of it, moved on. But then soon after, they called her again. There's a second pit like that, exactly with the same configuration, with the same bricks. And then I don't remember if it was the same day, after another day. We had a third one and we realized that they were in line. Three mysterious pets in three separate rooms. They wanted to investigate them more, but they were empty, deep, dark holes, 22 feet deep.
So it's a bit scary. And you definitely cannot go inside. Although to really understand what it is, you need to go inside, you need to investigate what is there. They didn't know what was at the bottom of these pets, what they were used for. But Martina wondered if there might be something informative there. After we realized that these three pits were connected, we started thinking on how to sample the soil that was on the very bottom of it.
So to make shift claw grabber, I used it to scrape the bottom of the hole. And they found what they had been looking for all that time. Dirt. When you collect soil, it looks like soil. We get excited. But it looks just like soil. The Archaeobotnus Lorenzo Castelano takes the sample and looks at it under the microscope. And he discovers something peculiar. At a certain point, Lorenzo calls me and it's like, you want to see these.
He tells her, I think we might just have found sewage, medieval sewage. And I was like, how can you prove this? He says he found several seeds in the soil from edible plants such as melon and grape. And when he observed them closely, he noticed that they were mineralized. In other words, the organic matter was replaced by phosphate and mineral deposits. He knew there was only one place this might have come from. Someone's butt.
The three deep pits were likely a series of toilets. They appeared aligned because they were most likely part of a connected sewage system. This was about as far away from a beautiful object to bring back to the museum as you could possibly get. Stuff like this is not pretty to look at. But discoveries like these help archaeologists paint a fuller picture of the history of this region. So you can have a sense of what are the fruit and vegetables that are being eaten in a specific time.
It tells us about the diet, the climate, the agriculture, trade. It really opens up what kind of infrastructure people had in their everyday life. Martina told Stolen this story back at Fresh Kills. So you were digging in the toilets? What did you find? From the researcher point of view, what we really hope to find are organic remains of what people were eating.
So what do you expect to find in a sewage? Occasionally, I'm sure that you might have little finds of little objects that either fell into the pit or were trashed in there. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because now we make these archives everywhere, these landfills. So yeah, your job will be easier in the future. It's pretty easy. What are the things that really, you know, when I think of myself as an archaeologist and think about what we are looking at?
We have this approach of cataloguing up, we think. It is an archive, but it is us who create the archive in the moment in which we label it. This all leads me to wonder, what will archaeologists of the future learn about us from the waste archives of New York City? That's coming up after the break. Hey, quick favor. We're conducting an audience survey and we'd be grateful if you could take just a few minutes to visit MattMewZim.org.
Slash immaterial survey to take the survey today. That's metmewZim.org slash immaterial survey. Thanks. Come on in. I love a good door bag. That's our friendly trash connoisseur Stolen with our producer Salman Ahad Kud. We're deep in Queens in a massive garage space that looks like an airplane hanger. I'm always finding studios in some of the least likely places. Sanitation garages, storage units, botanical gardens, wherever I can find a little knuck to work.
We're here because Stowe is the perfect person to answer my question. What stories will archaeologists of the future find in the waste we leave behind? Stowe has been thinking about this question for a long time. My interest in trash goes all the way back into childhood. I think I was always interested in detourtus. One of the cool places to hang out in my hometown was the dump.
You would just sort of see all of these random things that people were just kind of dumping and getting rid of. But if you wanted to find stuff to make things with, that was a great free store basically for art materials and toys. He grew up around Washington, DC, where he would often visit the Smithsonian American Art Museum to see his favorite artwork, a sculpture by the mid 20th century artist James Hampton.
Consisting of about 180 individual parts, the monumental piece that kept Stowe coming back is known as the Throne of the Third Heaven of the nation's millennium general assembly. It's massive. A cushioned throne sits in the middle, surrounded by objects that look like they're covered in silver and gold. Crowns, or neatly decorated pedestals, winged plaques that look like enormous golden butterflies. It's this beautiful, stulpsure, mostly matted tinfoil and cardboard.
That's the thing that most fascinated Stowe. Hampton's astonishing throne is made entirely of discarded materials. Hampton used tossed aside objects he found in his neighborhood like old furniture, jelly jars, and materials like light bulbs and discarded purple paper from the federal building where he worked as a janitor during the day. Stolen was inspired by this work. He himself became an artist and connoisseur of trash.
But instead of literally sculpting trash in his art, Stowe creates conceptual videos, prints, writings, and performances that meditate on rubbish. In 2021, he even got a job with the New York City Department of Sanitation as their artist in residence. He started at Sanitation HQ at 125 Wors Street. He wanted to spend some time with the people doing the hard work of hauling trash in the US's largest waste management department.
So one day he woke up at 4am and followed a sanitation crew as they went through their day. And he wasn't following just any sanitation crew. He was following the guys who picked up his own trash. I wanted to ride around with the actual people who pick up my garbage. So I rode around with Frank and Egan, super nice guys. And we go around and do our neighborhood. We do my block. We do my own garbage. What was so fascinating was riding around my own neighborhood with those guys.
They know a lot about the neighborhood. They know who's just moved in and who moved out. Who had a baby? Who likes to eat my donals? You see a lot about people through what they throw out. And sometimes you find out stuff you don't want to know. But a lot of times you find out just what makes up a people. Right? Because essentially trash as bad as it is that did sustain us. It's like proof of existence. We exist. We waste. You know, I'm wasting a come out of your body.
So much of the sanitation of forces invisible, I would say. I wish everyone could ride around with their personal sanitation workers. Because now when I put out garbage, I'm like, Frank and Egan are going to pick this up. You know, I'm like double, you know, rap and head. I'm making sure it's not too heavy. I'm growing in my neighbor's garbage and making sure it's like, you know, not too heavy. There's nothing sharp sticking out.
You know, because these are people that I know and like, these are my friends are actually going to come picking up. Seeing the literal labor of sanitation made such an impression on me. You know, and yeah, you can think about it. But until you're there and like people are having a lift, all this crazy stuff and stick it in there and then it squeezes it and all this garbage juice, like I'm shooting out of the back of the truck.
And you know, you have to dodge it to not get hit in the face by it. That's a visceral experience that you're never going to forget. After seeing the work up close, Stowe was determined to try and document the history of this integral department and its employees. He set up camp in a repair shop run by the department in Woodside Queens. While he was browsing through the facility, he stumbled upon a huge screen printing shop that had been inactive for decades.
It was great to literally turn the lights on. It was like totally dark and dormant when I found it. And as he started to get the old shop running again, he found 50 years worth of old screens used to print department of sanitation signs. These are screens that had, they still had the old designs that had been used for the past 50 years. So these are designs that say don't litter please with like broken bottles and cans, you know, or Brooklyn supports clean streets and clean beaches.
And as an artist, I was really interested in the visual language of sanitation, you know, how are they telling people over and over for the last 50 years? Basically the same stuff, don't litter, pick up your dog's poop, let's try to keep our streets and beaches clean. And so he decided to create his own mashups of that history.
I was starting to put together the pieces of the visual history of sanitation and how they were creating these messages, basically by cleaning up the space and then repurposing the signs themselves. He met the painters who create all the signage and paint the trucks today and he showed them how to operate the old screen printing machine. And as he started to get to know more and more people, they also got to know him.
They started showing him all kinds of things from the department's past. They knew he was fascinated by discarded stuff. And I found so much stuff in the screen printing shop. And so someone mentioned, oh, have you been in the TV studio? And I was like, the TV studio. To still surprise, in the same building, a few stories above, there was a discarded TV studio, fully equipped with all sorts of film and video equipment.
He ran into the boxes there and found a band of film cans and tapes. The department had no way of playing these anymore. So no one knew what was in them. So intervened thinking, wait, there might be something valuable here. So I began digitizing it all. And I wound up digitizing, think around 500 hours of the footage. And as he was digitizing, he found a remarkable history of the city unfolding across the footage.
So in the footage, you actually get to see New York City getting built. A lot of New York City is built on trash. If you're feeling down in the dumps, have I got a tour for you? It's near the water. You can feel the hot sun. And on a clear day, you can even see the twin towers. And it's in Staten Island. Welcome to the city's largest garbage dump. In these old videos of fresh kills that Stowe uncovered, a newscaster gives a tour of the landfill that shows a view of the twin towers.
But after 9.11, the debris from the towers were taken to fresh kills. That would be the final deposit made on fresh kills before it closed. Fresh kills today mostly looks like a regular park. Our history neatly hidden away under layers of foliage and leaf shape. The chapter of this site as a landfill is now complete. So for millions of New Yorkers for decades, their trash went away. But for hundreds of thousands of Staten Islanders, the trash came here.
Andy, our parks department tour guide, gets it. Both conceptually and literally. He's a Staten Islander. And I think that now we're looking at this as a collective project that has been worked on knowingly or unknowingly by millions of New Yorkers over decades. They didn't realize they were building what will be the largest park in New York City. But that is what we're standing up. It's an associate sculpture. Social sculpture. Love this.
We created it. You know, like in all its facets. And we're still creating it, you know, in other places, right? I also think about how New York City exports all our garbage. Even though it's not here anymore or if it's not in New York City, it's going to Virginia, it's going to Ohio. So now these other landfills are being created in other places. And I can't not think about all that. It's just like multiplying, multiplying, you know.
And it's overwhelming to think about how that's happening every day. I mean, it's interesting because now we make these archives everywhere. These landfills. So yeah, your job will be easier in the future. Just as archaeologists of today, like Martina, stumble upon fragments from the past. Future Martinas might one day dig into fresh kills.
Wonder about the lives of New Yorkers past. And try to piece together their stories by uncovering what lives underneath the lush green park. It has now become. Excavating these kinds of remnants provides a valuable lens on how people have lived through time. Though we might prefer to ignore it, though it isn't necessarily pretty, our legacy comes down to what might be seen as trash someday. It's what remains when all else has faded away.
Immaterial is produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Salman Ahad Khan and Collins, Samantha Henig, Eric Newsom, Emma Vecchioni, Sarah Wombold and Jimmy York. Additional staff includes Laura Barth, Julia Bordelon, Skyla Choi, Maria Cosineca and Rachel Smith. This season would not be possible without Andrea Bayer, Inca Dragomieler and Douglas Heggley. Sound design by Ariana Martinez and Kristen Muller.
This episode includes original music composed by Austin Fisher, fact checking by Mary Mathis and Claire Hyman. Special thanks to Agiva Jima Brimpong and Avery Truffelman. Immaterial is made possible by Dasha Zukova-Niarkos. Additional support is provided by the Zodiac Fund. This episode would not have been possible without Associate Curator Martina Rujati, Sto Lin and Andy Blancero. And special thanks to Associate Curator Brenda Kumar and Curator Navina Hayder.
To learn more about this episode and see pictures of artworks discussed, visit the Metz website at metmuseum.org slash immaterial trash. I'm your host, Camille Dunci. Do you have an idea for immaterial? Tell us about it. If you have a material or a topic or a story idea you'd like us to explore, email us at podcastatmetmuseum.org. That's podcastatmetmuseum.org. I promise we'll read every message. We can't wait to learn what sparks your curiosity.