Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p
Tickets $12

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

Artist sTo Len, whose work has embodied an in-the-field practice that blends civic stewardship with playful investigations into lesser seen aspects of our human imprint, will join us to present a fascinating exploration into the history of waste in New York City.

As a recent Public Artist in Residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation, Len stumbled across a dormant municipal television studio which was home to ostensibly the largest media waste archive in the world. Through watching and digitizing an estimated 500 hours of footage, Len has found training videos, union films, Public Service Announcements, interviews, environmental programs, cartoons, commercial campaigns, and TV news broadcasts that collectively tell the history of not only the world’s largest sanitation department but of New York City through the lens of its garbage.

The Smithsonian described Len’s Art as luring the audience into experiencing the waste systems they live within, a creative process through which “he embeds himself among places, people, and objects that may otherwise lie neglected.”

Following the presentation, Len will be in conversation with Robin Nagle, NYC Department of Sanitation’s anthropologist-in-residence, to discuss the implications of Len’s work on the history and politics of waste within our worsening climate crisis, diving into the invisible labor of the city’s municipal waste management and the public’s relationship to our ecological footprint.

Join us for a rare glimpse into this archive and work-in-progress to witness the evolution of the public’s ecological consciousness as recycling programs and neighborhood litter clean ups became more commonplace. Amidst sobering scenes of our collective detritus are moments of comedy, whimsy, insanity, and of course nostalgia for old NYC. See you there!

Program

Discard Records by sTo Len

“Discard Records will be a cumulative work responding to my experience as the Artist in Residence at the NY Department of Sanitation. Coupling my experiential research in the agency and my revitalization of their TV studio, this film is a very personal response to a treasure trove of historical material about waste in our current era of the climate crisis. It is not only the preservation of a long lost archive but a contemporary activation that is to be shared as a public artwork in this moment of ecological awareness. Adapting the aesthetics and recycling the materials of the sanitation department, Discard Records is a remixed historical film that is intended to spark new conversations that explore the intimate but often ignored relationship between the public and their waste.”

Program Duration: 1 hr

Bios

sTo Len is a genre fluid artist whose work has centered on place-based collaborations with abused landscapes and co-creations with communities and municipal agencies. The cross-disciplinary nature of Len’s practice spans printmaking, video, sound, performance, installation, drawing, and social practice work, threaded together by a site- responsive process of making. Recent projects have included a Trash Museum in Kyrgyzstan, a community pirate radio show in New Mexico, a series of plant-based printmaking while in residence at the Queens Botanical Garden in NY and an interactive
video installation at the Grand Canyon. Len was the first Artist in Residence at AlexRenew Wastewater Treatment facility in Virginia and the Public Artist in Residence at the NY Department of Sanitation. Len is based in Queens, NY with over two decades of residence in NY and familial roots in Vietnam and Virginia.

Nagle’s book Picking Up, an ethnography of the New York City Department of Sanitation, is based on a decade of work with the DSNY, which included time on the job as a uniformed sanitation worker.

Her research fits within the new interdisciplinary field of discard studies. She considers the category of material culture known generically as waste, with a specific emphasis on the infrastructures and organizational demands that municipal garbage imposes on urban areas. Within this broad perspective, she focuses on the people, history, and politics inherent to labors of waste, and how garbage is implicated in every contemporary environmental crisis. She also explores how, when, and why particular examples of material culture come to be defined as “trash,” and the varied consequences, in many contexts, of such a definition.

Since 2006 Nagle has been the DSNY’s anthropologist-in-residence, an unsalaried position structured around several projects.