This project investigates Tuvalu’s waste landscape as both material crisis and living archive. Through fieldwork with the local waste management team-collecting, documenting, and sorting materials across the island-the research builds a taxonomy of discarded objects: plastic bottles, aluminum cans, caps, foams, and fragments. Each was cataloged by composition, behavior, and chemical emission, transforming debris into data.
The installation merges film, drawing, projection, and physical waste to trace how these materials accumulate, burn, embed, and persist across Tuvalu’s terrain. A large-scale section drawing reimagines the landfill as future geology-layered by decomposition timelines, thermal behavior, and environmental impact. Paired with a material taxonomy and a site-specific protocol known as the Data Mourning Agency, the project reframes waste not as residue, but as a temporal, political, and ecological witness in a place where land is disappearing, but matter endures.
