Abstract

The long-term project Natureculture Preserve Marhult (Naturkultureservatet Marhult), which launched as part of the Småland Triennial in 2023, is concerned with site-specific and process-based investigations of the illegal landfill Marhult (Uppvidinge). Dumped and scattered over the 30-hectare post-industrial sawmill ALEX, approximately 35,000 tonnes of hazardous waste consisting of “fluff” (ground car parts), demolition debris, slaughterhouse waste and various microplastics have since 2015 transformed the site into a toxic terra incognita. The landfill, run by various enterprises with ties to criminal activity adjoining the village of Marhult, poses the kind of multi-complex environmental threat typically associated with the Global South.

The key objective of the project is to investigate and research the dump site as a critical mass of archaeological, ecological and cultural agency ripe with deeply entangled relationships between what we call nature and culture, human and inhuman, or artefact and ecofact. Could waste constitute future natural-cultural heritage? Waste as world heritage? How can artistic processes and transdisciplinary methods investigate, rethink and transform the unknown potential of waste as natureculture? This article aims to present findings and insights, renegotiating the often binary concepts of natural and cultural heritage by considering contaminated sites as field, discourse and material for transdisciplinary processes between preservation, remediation and rewilding.

Official logotype for the platform Naturkulturreservat, designed by Timo Menke, 2023 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Natureculture Preserve Marhult

A prefinding instead of a preface:

Open book with a quote by Leif Holmstrand and Pär Thörn on the left page
Section 93 from the book One Word from the Disassembled Dictionary: “Science fiction”, 2021; photo: Timo Menke (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

The overproduction of waste leads to unexpected results, to transformation. Beautiful beings and twilight tentacles. The landfill dump becomes the world, a different world.

—Leif Holmstrand and Pär Thörn [1]

We will get back to that.


  1. One word from the Disassembled Dictionary: “Science fiction”.
    Various plots for sci-fi novels found by Leif Holmstrand and Pär Thörn, an essay by Jerry Määttä, an artist’s statement by Niklas Wallenborg and time- and space-related lines by Arnold Schwarzenegger characters compiled by Oscar Guermouche, Sandra Praun and Tessa Praun, Praun & Guermouche, Stockholm, 2021.

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]

Three images of the Marhult landfill site taken closer up and further away, 2021
Timo Menke, Documentation of the Marhult landfill, 2021, Marhult landfill series (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
  1. 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).
  2. SVT Nyheter. “Sopberget i Marhult, SVT Nyheter”. 2021. Available at https://www.svt.se/nyheter/om/sopberget-i-marhult (accessed 2025-07-12).
  3. “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]

Aerial photo of AB Alex Träindustrier, Lenhovda (1957) with lumber piles neatly arranged surrounded by trees
Caption: AB Alex Träindustrier, Lenhovda (1957). Flygfotosamlingen 505/1957; photo: Olle Lilljeqvist, AB Flygtrafik, Kulturparken Småland / Smålands museum, licensed under CC pdm, Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal
  1. 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]

A sequence of images of the Marhult landfill by Timo Menke, shot in 2021, with close-ups of piles of waste
Timo Menke, Documentation of the Marhult landfill, 2021 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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.

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

The Småland Triennial 2023

Official profile image for the platform Naturkulturreservat by Timo Menke, showing the logo and name on what seems like an official sign attached to a tree
Timo Menke, Official profile image for the platform Naturkulturreservat, 2023 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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?

  1. 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:

  • Kristoffer Palmgren, an artist, musician and microbiologist, extracted microbiological samples… [8]
  • Under the moniker Garbonomix, garbologists Dr Leila Papoli-Yazdi and Dr Omran Garazhian assembled the detailed report Garbological Investigation of the Marhult Landfill… [9] Garbology is a branch of archaeology that examines detailed patterns of consumption.
  • The work of Lerin/Hystad (Simon Torssell Lerin and Bettina Hvidevold Hystad)… [10] Under the umbrella Electronic Flora…
  • Ireland-based artist and archaeologist John Sunderland… [11]
  • Artist and project initiator Timo Menke… [12]

Participants and collaborators collage
Cropped image of the official page for the project Naturkulturreservatet Marhult on the Smålandstriennalen 2023 website (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

  1. Palmgren, Kristoffer and Ivarsson, Magnus…
  2. Garazhian, Omran and Papoli-Yazdi, Leila…
  3. Torssell Lerin, Simon and Hvidevold Hystad, Bettina…
  4. Sunderland, John…
  5. Menke, Timo…

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”.

Design sketch for the Natureculture safety vest and photo of three people wearing the fluorescent yellow vests and protective hard hats among a large waste heap
Design sketch for the Natureculture safety vest, with Leila Papoli-Yazdi and Omran Garazhian wearing it when Swedish Television SVT interviewed them on site; Timo Menke, 2023. (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Pink Intermezzo

The abovementioned Think Pink scandal refers to a major environmental crime in Sweden involving the waste management company NMT Think Pink. The company, known for its pink waste bags, was found guilty of illegally dumping and burying at least 200,000 tonnes of waste and other harmful substances—such as arsenic, dioxins, zinc, lead, copper and petroleum products—at various sites across the country. Several of the waste dumps also caught fire, causing further environmental damage and risk. The scandal has been described as Sweden’s largest environmental crime investigation. Think Pink’s former CEO Fariba Vancor, formerly known as Bella Nilsson, and her ex-husband Thomas Nilsson were convicted of 19 counts of “aggravated environmental crime”. Five of the accused were handed prison sentences, ranging from two to six years, and ordered to pay millions of Kronor in damages to fund the massive clean-up operation [13].

For a thorough contextualisation of Natureculture Preserve Marhult, it is necessary to discuss the implications of the rather sensational environmental crimes committed by Think Pink for several reasons. To begin with, by the time I developed and started this project in 2023, I wasn’t aware of any Think Pink scandal and entered the site after the latest owner’s bankruptcy. As the scandal received wider public attention and became an unintended referential backdrop to the project, Marhult was lacking evidence of any complicit engagement, such as pink bags or documented ties to the company. Marhult never featured in this investigation, no one has hitherto been charged for the apparent crimes committed there, and in a number of bureaucratic moves, the municipality of Uppvidinge together with the bankruptcy trustee have instead focused on finding a new owner willing to take responsibility for running and sanitising the property [14].

In retrospect, however, Think Pink is linked to Marhult: in terms of the practical (mis-)management patterns at work in illegal dumping, the criminal corporate structures running the site, and the way in which legislative deregulation has been instrumental for creating new private markets for waste management, and with it a number of wicked problems. Think Pink’s hauntological shadow has wider implications for the environmental consequences caused by waste (mis-)management, but also for the reception of Natureculture Preserve Marhult on its own terms. This means on the one hand that I fully support holding people and businesses accountable for their criminal activities and taking legal measures against any future schemes. On the other hand, and in sharp contrast, the actual misconduct provides a bigger picture in relation to the project. Rooted in the general wickedness of waste—understood here as “resistant to resolution”—I have persisted to situate the project around staying with waste and with the specific dump as a site of critical natureculture heritage
[15]. Rather than resolving the wicked problem by literally getting rid of it, the preserve proposes a model for transdisciplinary and artistic processes between conservation, remediation and rewilding, developing long-term engagement and situated events.

  1. Lamche, Anna. “Fariba Vancor: Sweden’s ‘queen of trash’ jailed for waste dumping”. BBC News. 17 June 2025. Available at
    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77vlkmyyrko (accessed 2025-07-14).
  2. P4 Kronoberg. “Jonas har köpt sågverkstomten i Marhult: ‘ska ta mitt ansvar’”. Sveriges Radio. 26 March 2024. Available at
    https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/jonas-har-kopt-sagverkstomten-i-marhult-ska-ta-mitt-ansvar (accessed 2025-07-13).
  3. Rittel, Horst W. J., and Webber, Melvin M. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences, vol. 4, 1973, pp. 155–69. doi:10.1007/BF01405730.

Situated Events (Gestaltade händelser)

The project has generated a heterogeneous multitude of meetings, conversations and processes slowly crystallising into something I have named situated events (gestaltade händelser) to acknowledge the multi-modal and transdisciplinary nature of each gathering, adapted to its circumstances. Each situated event has turned out differently in scope, format and public outreach and forms a continuation of the project even beyond its actual spatial and temporal boundaries.

Natureculture Workshop “Waste-in-Progress”

The natureculture workshop “Waste-in-Progress” took place on 27 July 2023, at the small playground next to the landfill in Marhult, where some participants presented their artistic and transdisciplinary processes. In addition to Lerin/Hystad and Dr Leila Papoli-Yazdi and Dr Omran Garazhian (Garbonomix), Dr William Hogland (Professor of Waste Management and Recycling) and Dr Ulyana Muñoz Acuña also participated, presenting results from remediating landfills into phytoremediation parks with examples from Sweden and Estonia.

Three images documenting the natureculture workshop “Waste-in-Progress” presentations, with some people standing behind a table or near the local bus station talking to others gathered around them
Documentation of the natureculture workshop “Waste-in-Progress”, 2023; photos: Anders Bergö, all rights reserved

Natureculture Festival Wastestock

Poster for the 2023 Wastestock festival, with a pink logo against a purple sky above a grey site
Official poster for the natureculture Wastestock festival, 2023, Timo Menke, (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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.

Image of Åsa Ståhl’s performance lecture “Holding Surplus House,” with the artist dressed in black in front of her bright yellow tiny house on wheels surrounded by listeners
Documentation of Åsa Ståhl’s performance lecture “Holding Surplus House” at the natureculture Wastestock festival, 2023; photo: Anders Bergön

In her performance lecture “Holding Surplus House”, Åsa Ståhl, an artist and design researcher at Linnaeus University, focused on how to understand and use resources in creative, collective and critical ways.[1] By building, inhabiting and constantly redesigning a tiny house on wheels, which was on display at the festival, she keeps exploring how households can be a starting point for sustainable change.

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.

Introducing their artistic process of recording bio-electric signals from plants and converting them into music with modular synthesizers in Electronic Flora, Lerin/Hystad (Simon Torssell Lerin and Bettina Hvidevold Hystad) performed an improvised concert with plants, sensors, synths and guitar, based on recordings made from plants at the landfill. [4]

Two people performing with plants and a mixing deck on a table against a backdrop of an image of a waste heap
Documentation of Lerin/Hystad’s acoustic performance Electronic Flora at the natureculture Wastestock festival, 2023; photo: Anders Bergön

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.

Viewers watching a screen with a text against a backdrop of an image of the Marhult waste heap during the natureculture Wastestock festival]
Title slide of Fannie Frederikke Baden’s presentation during the natureculture Wastestock festival, 2023; photo: Anders Bergön, all rights reserved

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.

  1. 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).
  2. Nilsson Stutz, Liv. Linnaeus University. Available at https://lnu.se/en/staff/liv.nilssonstutz/ (accessed 2025-07-13).
  3. Baden, Fannie Frederikke. Lunds universitet. Available at https://portal.research.lu.se/sv/persons/fannie-frederikke-baden (accessed 2025-07-13).
  4. Torssell Lerin, Simon. Electronic Flora: Simon Torsell Lerin & Bettina Hvidevold Hystad. Stockholm: Art & Theory Publishing. 2025.
  5. Hasan, Zeenath. Linnaeus University. Available at https://lnu.se/en/staff/zeenath.hasan/ (accessed 2025-07-13).
  6. 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.

Panel discussion 'Systema Naturae Toxicae' at Linné University Växjö, 2024
The panel of the “Systema Naturae Toxicae” discussion at Linné University Växjö, 2024; photo: Helen Hägglund

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.

Three images: 1. People queueing to enter a small, elevated space; 2. Printed matter is spread out on a table; 3. People stand in a circle in front of a screen with a projection during the situated reading Wasteshop
The situated reading “Wasteshop” at Växjö Art Gallery 2024; photos: Timo Menke, Andrea Karlsén (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

The Future of the Past

Natureculture Preserve Marhult continues to develop and produce situated events reflecting the dilemmas and paradoxes of organising waste as heritage. Waste as World Heritage points to a long-term concept and engagement with several key questions: how to sustainably preserve and include the unsustainable, and how to safely “stay with the trouble” rather than unsustainably get rid of waste from a hegemonic heritage concept. Natureculture Preserve Marhult proposes a model for transdisciplinary and artistic processes between conservation, remediation and rewilding, preferring long-term processes and situated events before quick-fix problem solutions.

Information panel for Naturkulturreservatet Marhult Preserve with a map of the site alongside explanatory text
Timo Menke, Information panel for the Naturkulturreservatet Marhult Preserve in the style of traditional Swedish Wildlife Preserve signs, 2023 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

 

Post-ending

Open book with a quote by Leif Holmstrand and Pär Thörn on the left page
Section 93 from the book One Word from the Disassembled Dictionary: “Science fiction”, 2021; photo: Timo Menke (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

A prefinding instead of a preface:

The overproduction of waste leads to unexpected results, to transformation. Beautiful beings and twilight tentacles. The landfill dump becomes the world, a different world.

—Leif Holmstrand and Pär Thörn [1]

 

 

We will get back to that—again and again.


  1. One word from the Disassembled Dictionary: “Science fiction”.
    Various plots for sci-fi novels found by Leif Holmstrand and Pär Thörn, an essay by Jerry Määttä, an artist’s statement by Niklas Wallenborg and time- and space-related lines by Arnold Schwarzenegger characters compiled by Oscar Guermouche, Sandra Praun and Tessa Praun, Praun & Guermouche, Stockholm, 2021.
Official logotype for the platform Naturkulturreservat, designed by Timo Menke, 2023 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)