Rethinking Waste and the Logics of Disposability: Compound 13 Lab (2018-2021)

Rethinking Waste and the Logics of Disposability: Compound 13 Lab focuses on the knowledge politics of the informal waste management industry in the 13th Compound in Dharavi, Mumbai's largest informal settlement, where members of the project team have been working within a series of partnerships established since 2012, in particular through intensive collaboration, dialogue, and action research with Acorn Foundation, India. The 13th Compound processes approximately 80% of Mumbai's hard domestic waste, where up to 250,000 rag-pickers supply 40,000 people employed in grassroots recycling micro- enterprises, working in risky and unsanitary conditions.

Compound 13 Lab is a space for experimental design and learning, whose innovative programme introduces design and media tools, audiovisual technologies, 3D design and digital fabrication to disadvantaged, marginalised citizens who, because their socio-economic status, do not normally have access to these resources. ACORN members co-design and develop a bespoke 'living curriculum' that responds to their issues, addresses their needs, and aids their future goals. The implementation of the Lab is intended to create a space of enquiry where these local knowledges and practices can be communicated within and beyond Dharavi, through a process of increasingly self-organised making and learning.

This Collection contains information about Compound 13 Lab and the Compound 13 Lab Artist Residency Programme, as well as the Materials of Hope (2018) film and its dissemination at Media Wall, Bath Spa University (2018) and at Meetings: Central & Western Jutland Video & Performance Festival (2019). It also contains two chapters from Parry, B. and Jeffery, G. eds. (2021), Waste Work: the art of survival in Dharavi, Bath: Wunderkammer (ISBN 9780993551178) [delayed from its original 2020 publishing date by the global Covid-19 pandemic], along with an outline of the book, and contextualising information about the Meetings festival. Further contextualising information in the form of a 300-word statement about the research project, a timeline, and a set of research questions is also included.