First Encounters

My first encounter with Marhult was in late 2021 while preparing for the exhibition “Allt ska bort—allt går igen” (2022) dealing with artistic recycling at Växjö konsthall, Småland, Sweden.^[2] Marhult was featured in the news as an illegal dump in rural Småland.^[3] Although I have spent many hours, days and weeks on site, in retrospect it seems difficult to describe this first encounter. The whole site provoked an extreme ambivalence: fascination and disgust, a sense of chaos and care, a collapse of conflicting experiences, a slow entropy. Entangled relationships between what we often call nature and culture, human and inhuman, or “artifact and ecofact,” according to Caitlin DeSilvey, lay scattered all over the place.^[4]

2. Menke, Timo. “Allt ska bort—Allt går igen”. Eknemonit. 2022. Available at https://eknemomit.nu/allt-ska-bort-allt-gar-igen (accessed 2025-07-09).
3. SVT Nyheter. “Sopberget i Marhult, SVT Nyheter”. 2021. Available at https://www.svt.se/nyheter/om/sopberget-i-marhult (accessed 2025-07-12).
4. “To borrow a turn of phrase from environmental archaeology, I found myself with a decision to make about whether I was looking at an artifact—a relic of human manipulation of the material world—or an ecofact—a relic of other-than-human engagements with matter, climate, weather, and biology.” Jones, Martin. “Environmental Archaeology”. In Archaeology: The Key Concepts. Ed. Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn. London: Routledge. 2005. pp. 85–89. Cited in DeSilvey, Caitlin. Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2017. p. 28.

Dumped and scattered over the 30-hectare defunct sawmill ALEX since 2015, circa 35,000 tonnes of hazardous waste consisting of “fluff” (ground car parts), demolition debris, slaughterhouse waste and various microplastics have transformed both site and community into a toxic terra incognita. This illegal landfill poses the kind of multi-complex environmental risk typically associated with socio-economic conditions in the Global South. Multiple changes of ownership connected to an international crime scheme, very similar to the notable Think Pink scandal, added a level of legal danger to the site.^[5]

5. Södertörn Tingsrätt. “Fängelsestraff för flera personer i det så kallade think pink-målet”. Sveriges Domstolar. 17 June 2025. Available at https://www.domstol.se/nyheter/2025/06/fangelsestraff-for-flera-personer-i-det-sa-kallade-think-pink-malet/
   (accessed 2025-07-12).

The abhorrent and spectacular precarity of the site is screaming for action, but also poses a central question: how to work with waste and pollution from an artistic point of view? With what methods, approaches or techniques to investigate the site? How to process the problems at hand without solving or dissolving the attendant insoluble dilemmas, uncertainties and impossibilities? How to work with these in particular? Asking the site and its habitants—literally “staying with the trouble”—became the major modus operandi.^[6]

Doesn’t the accumulated waste and its (mis-)management reveal something more significant about our times than other hegemonic historical objects or sites? Regardless of how the dump came into being, don’t we share ownership and responsibility for all indiscernible waste collectively, as entangled as we are in consumption? Does this place, then, hold a special value as a weird and fragile, but also natural and cultural heritage site? Could waste qualify as shared natural–cultural heritage? Waste as world heritage? If so, what if the site were to be protected or preserved, rather than remediated or erased? Both natural and cultural, instead of neither natural nor cultural—something hitherto unarticulated or existing.

6. Haraway, Donna. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2016.

In the summer of 2023, I launched the project Natureculture Preserve Marhult as part of the Småland Triennial with the following project pitch ^[7]:

The Natureculture Preserve Marhult aims to artistically challenge,
institutionally renegotiate and historically redefine the separate concepts
of natural and cultural heritage by inventorying and situating the site of
the illegal waste dump in Marhult. According to the Swedish Environmental
Protection Agency, 9,000 of approximately 26,000 risk-classified polluted
areas in Sweden pose a very high or high risk to people and the environment.
Such areas can be described as lost places: after production or disaster,
beyond responsibility and off the commons—supposedly worthless anti-natural
environments and non-cultural heritage. Marhult leaves us with a complex
natural–cultural heritage—remnants of culture that adversely affect nature
and future species and generations. How can artistic processes and
transdisciplinary methods help us to understand, renegotiate and transform
the unknown potential of waste as Natureculture? How to develop a model for
an expanded and yet untested concept of Natureculture heritage?

7. Menke, Timo. “Naturkulturreservatet Marhult”. Smålandstriennalen. 2023.
   Available at https://www.smalandstriennalen.se/2023/utstallningar-och-projekt/naturkulturreservatet-marhult (accessed 2025-07-09).

I invited the following participants and collaborators from the Arts and Humanities with varying natural and/or cultural practices and competencies to work in a site-specific, transdisciplinary and process-based manner during the project period of summer 2023:

Designing Protection

Another critical aspect of the project evolved in considering how to deal with health and safety issues for access to the site. Permission to enter was required from the County Administrative Board, Uppvidinge municipality, bankruptcy trustees and two other forestry companies still operating heavy transports onto the site, to avoid disruptions and other possible risk. While initially frustrated with the administrative obstacles, I realised that safety and caution are in line with the idea of a preserve. To fully acknowledge this and make careful attention an embedded aspect of the project, I produced a custom-designed yellow vest—rendering all participants’ identity and safety “protected”.

Natureculture Festival Wastestock

The one-day natureculture Wastestock festival, which took place in Dädesjö (near Marhult) on 16 September 2023, featured contributions from scholars, artists, filmmakers and musicians relating to waste, ecology and sustainability—in the spirit of natureculture. As a social catalyst and node of exchange, the festival activated a model for an expanded concept of natural-cultural heritage and concluded the project during the triennial.

In their presentation “Timber and Trash”, Leila Papoli-Yazdi and Omran Garazhian (Garbonomix) provided a vivid account of how garbology can be instrumental in analysing consumption patterns with objects and models. Their detailed garbological study examined the waste management methods that have resulted in the formation of the Marhult landfill.

In the lecture “Waste, Culture and Chaos”, Liv Nilsson Stutz, Professor in Archaeology at Linnaeus University, contributed with insights on the anthropological signs of culture and chaos present in Marhult.^[2]

Doctoral student Fannie Frederikke Baden of the Division of Art History and Visual Studies, Lund University, proposed a sublime take on Marhult in the presentation “Sweden’s Plastic Chernobyl”, informed by her ongoing research in the relationship between nuclear, popular and visual cultures of nuclear accidents and climate change.^[3]

Cork-based artist and archaeologist John Sunderland presented Unfinished Business, an ongoing process utilising glass works, photography and archaeological drawing based on hybrid practice.

Soothing Surplus by Zeenath Hasan, senior lecturer at Linnaeus University and co-founder of Rude Food Malmö, Sweden’s first food-surplus catering company, served not only as an installation of edibles and culinary refreshment but engaged with food surplus as material for knowledge production.^[5]

Artist, musician and microbiologist Kristoffer Palmgren’s “Microbiological Study” analysed his own microbiological samples from the landfill used to investigate possible fungal populations, discovering two hitherto unidentified fungal species.

In my own presentation of the project Natureculture Preserve Marhult, the focus was on showing the possible potential for a self-organised platform to develop a model for an untested natural cultural heritage concept.

Filmmaker Alexander Rynéus screened the film The Storytelling Machine (Berättelsemaskinen), which revolves around storytelling and preservation through encounters with different people around Hylte municipality—a related rural depopulation area with now post-industrial heritage.^[6]

The intense programming culminated in a concert by the band Geten (Johan Danielsson & Kristoffer Palmgren)—locally produced power hymns evoked by rural love and despair.

17. Ståhl, Åsa et al. “Project: Holding Surplus House”. Linnaeus University. 2021. Available at https://lnu.se/en/research/research-projects/project-holding-surplus-house (accessed 2025-07-13).
18. Nilsson Stutz, Liv. Linnaeus University. Available at https://lnu.se/en/staff/liv.nilssonstutz/ (accessed 2025-07-13).
19. Baden, Fannie Frederikke. Lunds universitet. Available at https://portal.research.lu.se/sv/persons/fannie-frederikke-baden (accessed 2025-07-13).
20. Torssell Lerin, Simon. Electronic Flora: Simon Torsell Lerin & Bettina Hvidevold Hystad. Stockholm: Art & Theory Publishing. 2025.
21. Hasan, Zeenath. Linnaeus University. Available at https://lnu.se/en/staff/zeenath.hasan/ (accessed 2025-07-13).
22. Rynéus, Alexander. The Storytelling Machine. 2023. [film]. See https://alexanderryneus.se/the-story-machine (accessed 2025-07-13).

LinnéTalk: Systema Naturae Toxicae

The panel discussion “Systema Naturae Toxicae” at Linné University Växjö on 13 March 2024, part of the Linné Talks series, featured waste and classification and a troublesome diversity of “systems” opposing the very boundaries of classification. An expanded and polluted naturalism is reflected through the Natureculture Preserve Marhult in which the utopian Linnaean Garden has almost collapsed into a ruin in which poisons, plants, fungi and animals are part of a new ecology/archaeology/garbology that blurs all systemic boundaries. The discussion panel consisted of Axel Andersson (art historian, Royal College of Art), Timo Menke (artist/initiator), Liv Nilsson Stutz (archaeologist at Linnaeus University) and Leila Papoli-Yazdi (archaeologist at Linnaeus University), and was moderated by Kersti Forsberg.

Situated Reading “Wasteshop”

The Situated Reading (gestaltad läsning) “Wasteshop” at Växjö Art Gallery on 23 August 2024 concluded an in-depth text and image production period around the upcoming book Naturkulturreservatet Marhult—a companion anthology to the art project. All contributions, including text, images and music, were presented through excerpts, readings and micro-presentations. During the workshop, a new website for the platform, https://naturkulturreservat.nu, was launched.

The Future of the Past