Postnatural Wastescapes: Research Night

What if nature is not a wilderness to protect, but a system we’ve built? Postnatural Wastescapes is an evening of research presentations, listening exercises, and film that explore the landscape design of waste—not only where waste goes, but how its movement, processing, and disappearance shape our cities, territories, and environmental imaginaries. Part of Wasteland: Out of Sight, a month-long citywide festival dedicated to waste ecologies and infrastructures, the event unfolds at Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands’ national museum for architecture, design and digital culture.

Artist and researcher Yuri Tuma, co-founder of Madrid’s Institute for Postnatural Studies (IPS), introduces postnature as a conceptual tool for reframing ecological thought. Instead of accepting inherited ideas of nature as a static or neutral backdrop to human activity, Tuma examines how “nature” is itself a design, constructed through modernity’s spatial, aesthetic, and technological regimes - often obscuring the deep infrastructural and ecological entanglements of waste and resource management. Tuma draws from the Institute for Postnatural Studies’ para-academic methodology, inviting the audience to consider how embodied research and interspecies thinking can help us generate new ways of sensing, and designing for, the postnatural city.

Architect Carolien Schippers, founder of the Rotterdam-based spatial research studio -C-A-S-, presents her short film Artifacts of Accumulation (2025), created in collaboration with research studio LOCUMENT. The documentary maps Amsterdam’s peripheral waste infrastructures—including incinerators, sorting facilities, and former landfill zones, to reveal how the city is literally built upon buried matter. Combining speculative cartography with field research and documentary filmmaking, the work traces how waste’s invisibility is not accidental, but produced through architectural, bureaucratic, and social means—and builds on Schippers’ architectural research into peripheral urban zones, asking how landscapes of disposal and processing reflect broader spatial logics of marginalisation and erasure. The film will be introduced through a short research presentation by the artist.

Postnatural Wastescapes situates waste as more than residual matter. It is an organising force—shaping how we design, inhabit, and imagine the city. The evening opens a dialogue between urbanism, ecology, and architectural critique, proposing that to understand how cities function, we must first trace what they seek to erase.

This event is a core part of Wasteland Festival’s Wastescapes subprogramme hosted by Nieuwe Instituut, dedicated to examining postnatural landscapes and urban afterlives. Other highlights include the three-day Wastescapes Summer School, bringing together artists, researchers, and students for workshops on buried infrastructures and more-than-human cohabitation.