WasteScapes

Elizabeth (Liz) Miller and MJ Thompson, Canada

WasteScapes
(Canada, 2022)
https://wastescapes.com/about-wastescapes/

WasteScapes is a multi-platform research-creation designed by Liz Miller and MJ Thompson that involves pedagogical resources, media interventions, publications, and site-based learning. We developed the WasteScapes app for teachers interested in the potential of site-based learning, cycling enthusiasts, and Montrealers eager to explore their city in new ways.

Miller and Thompson would like to acknowledge that the App and related WasteScape events take place on unceded Indigenous land. The Kanien’kehá:ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations.

As you move through the city and its wastescapes, we invite you to reflect on the relationship between waste and colonialism. All of the places you will visit are unceded land, and as Max Liboiron suggests in Pollution Is Colonialism, “pollution is not a manifestation or side effect of colonialism but is rather an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to Land.”

Image from WasteScapes mobile app of a user on an augmented walk

Elizabeth (Liz) Miller and MJ Thompson

Elizabeth (Liz) Miller is a Professor in Communication Studies at Concordia University (Montreal) and a documentary maker with an expertise in environmental media. She uses collaboration and interactivity as a way to connect personal stories to larger social issues such as water privatization, gender, and climate change. Her media projects such as The Shore Line, Hands-on: Women, Climate, Change, and SwampScapes, have won awards and been screened in classrooms and at international festivals. She is the co-author of Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice.

MJ Thompson (PhD., New York University 2008) is a writer and teacher working on performance and embodiment. Her articles have appeared in Ballettanz, Border Crossings, The Brooklyn Rail, Canadian Art, Dance Current, The Globe and Mail, and more. Her essays have appeared in several anthologies, including Performance Studies Canada (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2017). She received the National Park Service Arts and Sciences Residency, Cape Cod, August 2019, where she worked on an essay about land privatization and the concept of the view as embodied (Departures 2020).