Phantasmagoria: Between Waste and Ritual

Abstract

This thesis centres the idea of waste as a socially produced characteristic not inherent to material objects, but rather, created through ambiguity and their inability to be assimilated into existing social, cultural, and physical structures of the city. The occlusion of waste from those who create it manifests as phenomena where ambiguous matter is negatively redistributed across various spatial and temporal scales, making it someone, someplace, or some other time’s problem. If the abject nature of waste is socially produced, can it be socialized through design into a productive actor, sparing the planet and our future-selves the burden of its consequences? Architecturally, the thesis speculates on how the adaptive reuse of a decommissioned waste incinerator in Montréal, Québec, can re-interpret a city’s relationship with waste using notions of phantasmagoric spectacle and ritual performance, affording critical perspectives and new meanings to the matter of waste, its processing, and its associated infrastructure.