DUMP SPACE: Freedom From Order
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Flying over Lagos, Nigeria, we discovered a huge urban dump. It was smoldering. Like a reverse Niagara, a wall of smoke rose to the sky. From the helicopter, you could smell it. The dump should have been awful, yet on its surface lived a community: improvised hovels, likely constructed from the contents of the dump. This was the dump as housing, as territory, as livelihood.
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AMO
The dump is the lowest form of spatial organization. Pure accumulation, it is formless, has an uncertain perimeter and location. The surface of the dump reveals only part of its contents; the dump is fundamentally inconsistent and unpredictable. But it has potential; it attracts scavengers.
Things and people that are dumped have somehow lost their previous usefulness – once they were something, now they are waste. They don't work; they are empty; they are beyond resuscitation (or love or respect), no matter how modest.
Fresh foods and things that still work are stored with care, kept in special climatic conditions, assembled with a degree of formal precision – with premeditation and organization – in piles, mountains, racks, shelves. Only the worthless is dumped. The worthless no longer has any right to geometry, to order. To be dumped is to be condemned to the world of disorder.
But in an overorganized world – a groaning, decrepit universe of systems – the shapeless and the worthless have a new value, a new allure. The dump is free from constraints, from selection, from the tyranny of style.
