Wasted Museum, Exhibition 9-20 November 2022
Wasted Museum, Exchange Erith:
The Wasted Museum is a collaboration between the Exchange, YoHa and the people of Erith to explore the waste that surrounds us.
A reawakening, a haunting of Eriths historic collection from the old Carnegie Library. From April 2020 to November 2020 we will hold a series of workshops to collect your objects for The Wasted Museum. This is an intimate exploration of Erith’s past and present flows of waste in and around the river Thames with special workshops from Kattie Surridge, Andy Freeman, Jill Westwood and Lesley Morris.
We are seeking any objects that have a realtion to waste, whatever the reason you kept them. The object can be valuable or not at all we are interested in the story behind why you kept them. Please bring your wasted object to the workshops which are free, please join us.
Context
For as long as humans have settled the banks of the Thames it has been a repository for the disposal of waste riding on the back of the 300,000 tonnes of sediment that the river transports from its source in Gloucestershire to the North Sea each year. _Thames Water Utilities Limited _processes 15 million people's wastewater which is poured back into the environment and also treats 4.4 billion litres of sewage a day which up until 1998 was dumped in the Estuary aboard Bovril Boats. In this context the river can be thought of as a kind of placeless movement, the tidal flows acting as a conveyer of raw materials, food, people, biology one way and waste, decay, disease and death the other. As a contemporary example of these flows in and out of bodies and their settlements. Two-thirds of London's drinking water is supplied by the river Thames and at the same time water companies discharge millions of litres of effluent and raw sewage back into the 160 km of tidal flow.
We will be catching up with our blog writing on this site so please come have a look round as the project continues.