Wastework

Francesca Borgo / Ruth Ezra

Quiringh Gerritsz van Brekelenkam, The Tailor’s Workshop (detail), 1661, Rijksmuseum, object no. SK-C-112. Source: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-C-112 (accessed 11 January 2024) — Quiringh Gerritsz van Brekelenkam, *The Tailor’s Workshop* (detail), 1661, Rijksmuseum, object no. SK-C-112. Source: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-C-112 (accessed 11 January 2024)

Quiringh Gerritsz van Brekelenkam, *The Tailor’s Workshop* (detail), 1661, Rijksmuseum, object no. SK-C-112. Source: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-C-112 (accessed 11 January 2024)

Wastework was an international, interdisciplinary conference on the materiality, spatiality, and processing of waste in the early modern workshop. It examined acts of disposal, displacement, removal, and abeyance – in short, the getting rid of unwanted things – and the consequences these carry for the study of early modern material culture. The conference foregrounded waste as the material expression of practices of ordering and classification by which people adjudicated between collection and disposal, wanted and unwanted, salvation and loss. In reimagining the discarded past, it tested the usefulness of contemporary formulations – secondary product cycles, material fatigue, metabolic flows, sustainability, recycling – while also proposing new typologies and categories.