Waste[d] Love[s]_Restor[y]ing Fyli Landfill

Abstract: Current practices of landfill restoration can be characterised as anthropocentric, violent and unsuccessful gestures of purification and control, while they erase traces of planetary history and habitats generated by waste and dirt. The dominant notion of landfill restoration insists on a concept of humans as directors of geo-bio flow who are capable of controlling and reversing the dirty chaos they created. However, matter has its own agency and as any other form of life, waste flows; it may eventually spill, leak and reach our bodies and surroundings through water, air and geological strata. Focusing specifically on Fyli landfill in Athens, the project’s goal is the articulation of a design proposal that questions the current practices of landfilling and landfill aftercare seeking for a reconceptualization of ecological restoration that does not imply a clean, purified and beautiful landscape but generates acts or re-membering and adapting towards a symbiosis with our mess. But how urban design can create the conditions between the coexistence between landfill’s processes of contamination and deformation and human attachment to cleanliness and sameness?This is the research question that is investigated through the specific context of Fyli landfill, seeking a new story for restor[y]ing our relationship to waste.