benchmarker, 2024
moldy bagels, bench
i’ve been reflecting on how our bodies are implicated in food waste. we rely on food to survive, yet once we’re full, our relationship with it shifts. what was once "potential energy" becomes something we view as gross, as abject, and it’s discarded. this shift in perception is tied to how we determine when we’ve had enough, and how food, when no longer needed, is repelled. in the case of the bagels, the body is implicated in a different way. the food went to waste not because we rejected it, but because of inefficiencies in human systems—storage, communication, and transport. the bagels weren’t eaten in time and eventually molded in overwhelming quantities. this, too, is a form of waste—one born from excess and privilege. waste, in this context, is often a consequence of abundance. i’ve been considering the relationship between privilege, waste, and the body, particularly how some bodies are able—or unable—to transform food into energy or waste.
this led me to think about how society treats certain bodies as waste, especially marginalized bodies, such as those experiencing homelessness. the stigmatization of poverty and the homeless is, in many ways, a form of societal rejection, similar to how we view food we can no longer consume. these ideas converged as i considered how waste is represented visually, and how privilege allows some bodies to "waste" resources in the first place. this brought me to think about how we design space to exclude certain bodies, such as anti-homeless architecture—spiked underpasses, segmented benches, and other methods of deterrence. the bench, in particular, became an interesting point of engagement, as it is both a literal and metaphorical space for considering how we treat bodies in relation to waste, exclusion, and privilege.
