A few months ago, this cargo-motorcycle was criss-crossing the streets  of Cairo. Acquired  by the Mucem
during a survey-acquisition campaign, it is now part of the collection  of the museum and will be presented during the exhibition Lives of Garbage: The Economy of Waste.

Our waste shapes our environment on a global scale, and as such, provides a privileged vantage point to observe this transformation. Pollution—its nature, composition, dangerousness, circulation, and transformation—is presented in this section and the major categories of waste are quantified to provide an understanding of their origins and their distribution. In fact, domestic waste cannot compare with the quantities of waste produced by industry, agriculture  and construction.
Equal space is thus given to those who are mobilizing to alert us to the pollution created by industrial discharges and emissions like at Fos-sur-Mer  or the Étang de Berre in the Marseille region. In the Mediterranean, millions of tonnes of micro-waste particles are circulating and will contaminate all plant and animal life in the medium term.

The economic and social history of waste is revisited through an ensemble of objects evoking the passage from a system where resources  are scarce, and must therefore be maintained and recovered,  to a model of consumption based on everything  being disposable. The former economy of repair and reuse gave rise to specialisation, various small trades of the cities or the fields. Repaired or reused objects, from the ethnographic collections, are displayed in opposition to packaging of contemporary plastics to evoke this evolution, and the choices that have determined this acceleration  of production.

This section begins in the streets with the most simple acts: sweeping, picking-up, followed by other essential actions: transport- ing, sorting, compacting. Objects from the collections  and videos from ethnographic surveys reveal the technologies, manual and industrial, used to treat waste in the cities studied: Cairo, Istanbul, Casablanca, Marseille and its environs, Tirana, and Naples.
In this section, we discover unusual, and sometimes spectacular, objects like the hooks and tags of rag pickers, a devil acquired in Istanbul, a motorised tricycle, a paper-press  used by the rag pickers of Emmaüs in the 1950s and an operating optical waste sorting machine on loan from the company Pellenc ST.
Sorting occupies a central place in waste management. It is through sorting that waste enters the global circuits of economic exchange and acquires value as a secondary raw material and thus as a new resource.

Re-employment consists  of giving a new life to what had been considered  waste, either in the same context, as in the case of second-hand clothes, or by using it in a new way.
In the Mediterranean,  re-employing  includes important sectors  of artisanal and industrial activities: weaving carpets  from textile remains, drapery made from pieces of cut fabrics, like patchwork or appliqués, re-employment of used tires or cans, and plastic packaging. In certain  regions of the Mediterranean re-employment has grown considerably, as is the case of the second hand clothing sector in Tunisia.
Recycling involves treating  waste as a secondary raw material that can be put to new use. The exhibition presents the recycling chains in Cairo and those of electrical and electronic  waste in France.

Re-employment consists  of giving a new life to what had been considered  waste, either in the same context, as in the case of second-hand clothes, or by using it in a new way.
In the Mediterranean,  re-employing  includes important sectors  of artisanal and industrial activities: weaving carpets  from textile remains, drapery made from pieces of cut fabrics, like patchwork or appliqués, re-employment of used tires or cans, and plastic packaging. In certain  regions of the Mediterranean re-employment has grown considerably, as is the case of the second hand clothing sector in Tunisia.
Recycling involves treating  waste as a secondary raw material that can be put to new use. The exhibition presents the recycling chains in Cairo and those of electrical and electronic  waste in France.

Waste is the subject of mobilizations of all kinds: technicians, scientists, but above all, politicians and citizens. The ecoballs of Cam- pania, the rubbish that obstructs the streets of Beirut, the Roma of Tirana doomed to living off the waste of the city are all examples of the struggles generated by the often scandalous management of waste.
This section also highlights exemplary actions to give visitors the desire to get involved. Indeed, populations often mobilise to clean a street, a beach, and also to discard less by producing and consuming less.

The scenography is designed to be dismantled and reused at the end of the exhibition in order to generate the least waste possible.

Large  panels of fibreboard,  the materials usually used at the Mucem for the gallery walls, are left untreated with neither coat- ings nor paint. The screws are visible, making the dismountable nature of the walls obvious. Only the panels bearing the titles of the different sections of the exhibition are engraved with a design juxtaposing contradictory pictograms (toxicity, radioactivity, sort- ing, recycling...) to accompany  visitors in their discovery  of the multiple issues related to the treatment of our waste.

The exhibition intentionally features dull tones, with the light brown of fibreboard, the grey of carton, on which the texts and graphics are printed. The bottoms of the showcases  and alcoves are in white to emphasize and highlight the collections  of objects.

The itinerary  is punctuated by a series of verbs in the infinitive, written in cut-out  letters on the gallery walls. From Naming to Collecting,  from  Reducing  to Burying,  the  content presented is organised  in a linear fashion, following the principal  actions included in the chain of operations of waste management, highly technical and yet always human.

For the final section the plateau opens onto the landscape, the horizon enters into the exhibition, and with it, the omnipresence of the Mediterranean. This last part is structured around authentic architecture, created especially to accommodate three investiga- tions into particular sectors. The sorting of second hand clothing in in Tunisia is depicted  under a tent of multi-coloured T-shirts, the process  of recycling  in Egypt is illustrated in a hut made of plastic braids, while the impasse of ecoballs in Italy is narrated in the sarcophagus  of a pyramid with steps, under the same black
 
tarpaulin that covers these mountains of garbage situated in the landscape of Campania.

The entrance  and exit of the exhibition  are each accompanied by an artistic  installation  that leaves open the many questions assailing those who dare to look at the many lives of garbage.

Scénographie et direction artistique : Encore Heureux, bkCLUB Architectes, Urbain, trop urbain

Encore Heureux (Still happy)

Founded in Paris in 2001 by Nicola Delon and Julien Choppin, Encore Heureux is an architectural firm that practises in the fields of architecture, design, and artistic installation. A laureate of the Nouveaux Albums des Jeunes Architectes (New Albums by Young Architects)—distinction of the Ministry of Culture—in 2006, it has produced  several cultural and tertiary facilities, both public and private, (concert  hall, cinema, museum, centres of innovation). In parallel, Encore Heureux designs sets, games, furniture, books and exhibitions. As a generalist architectural practice, the agency was distinguished  in 2014 by serving as scientific  commissioner for the exhibition Matière Grise, at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris, and as authors of a collective volume on the reuse of construction materials. In 2016, Sébastien Eymard joined the adventure as a third associate and the team has grown to include today some fifteen designers from diverse backgrounds.

http://encoreheureux.org/

bkCLUB Architectes

Founded in 2016 by Clotilde Berrou and Marc Kauffmann, bkclub Architectes is an architectural studio. After 15 years of practice with other agencies on mega-buildings (Friche de la Belle de Mai
& Centre  National des Arts du Cirque), they currently  develop projects, starting  from the singularities  of heritage and context. They seek an attentive and benevolent perspective  to find avail- able resources, sources of narratives, and construction materials. This implies considering the places, sometimes disinherited, see- ing there ordinary rites, listening to the stories and frustrations, like the hopes, so that at each level of intervention, from detail to building, the project finds its fertile and unexpected  soil.

http://bkclub.fr/L-agence

The collective Urbain, trop urbain

Bringing  together for this occasion,  Matthieu Duperrex,  Claire Dutrait  and François  Dutrait, the collective  offers  to grasp the current metamorphoses of the city and the world through reso- lutely subjective artistic and cultural practices, whether poetic or reflexive. Since 2010, through its engineering of writing, the col- lective accompanies researchers in particular in the “translation” of their work to serve a wide audience.

http://www.urbain-trop-urbain.fr

De l'économie des déchets

Le catalogue de l'exposition, sous la direction de Denis Chevallier et Yann-Philippe Tastevin

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