Contribution short abstract:

This paper addresses repair and reuse of everyday electronic appliances. It contrasts material practices and forms of revaluation at two types of repair spaces: professional workshops and activist communities, offering situated understandings of how “upcycling” might work in practice.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper addresses repair and reuse of electronic appliances, presenting preliminary results of an ethnographic study in the city of Barcelona. It contrasts material practices and forms of revaluation at two types of spaces: refurbishment and resale workshops, many of whom managed by extra-communitarian migrants, and “restarters” and other activist communities and networks for the right to repair. I start from the premise that repair continues to be a means of gaining a living, despite the triple programmed obsolescence (with respect to function, quality and convenience) and lack of spare parts. Second-hand smartphones and other obsolete ITC devices are moved within local and transnational circuits of both commerce and care. Practices and circulations are often hidden, they might be partly informal and are not usually described as being about the circular economy or upcycling, which contrasts with the narrative versality of the activist scene. The paper discusses how different paths towards “upcycling” might work in practice.

Contribution short abstract:

Implementing a circular economy in European construction proposes to reuse rather than waste materials. When reintegrating secondhand materials, practitioners reimagine a construction sector that handles existing materials more carefully, revalues manual labour and fosters collaborations.

Contribution long abstract:

Implementing a circular economy and thus reusing building materials as a form of upcycling is an omnipresent topic in the European construction sector. However, since the post-war construction boom in Western Europe, many actors in the construction sector have unlearned to deconstruct and build with reused components. Resources seemed to be endlessly available, but this has changed since the turn of the century and rising awareness of climate change and resource scarcity. Knowledge about the stocks and flows of building materials in the urban construction industry has become essential to implement circular economy as an important pillar of an ecological transformation. While the construction business mainly talks about the circulating materials, this paper engages with the considerable inputs of labour, skills, and knowledge necessary at different stages of the reuse cycle. My paper outlines that working with existing building materials – instead of ordering materials from stock – is a highly creative practice. Based on the everyday lives of reuse practitioners that I followed during 7 months of fieldwork in Vienna, I highlight that their expertise on parquet slats, perforated plate coverings, or ceiling panels unfolds in the everyday encounter between humans and these materials. When deconstructing, moving, designing with, and reintegrating secondhand materials, reuse practitioners also reimagine a construction sector that handles existing materials more carefully. This entails to revalue manual labour, to prevent waste, and to foster collaborations between different actors in the construction sector.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper aims to take the makers' point of view on upcycling that is characterised by a professional focus on the materiality of things.

Contribution long abstract:

Iron comes in different alloys. The more carbon, the harder the steel and the sharper the knife. However, there is a greater risk that the blade will bend or even break when hardening. It will also rust more quickly. There are also big differences in the purity of silver, which affects its malleability, lustre and value. While ancient silver coins were once melted down, Tuareg smiths began to forge jewellery from higher-purity sterling silver with the advent of tourism in the Sahara. But silver is heavy. Some women therefore prefer earrings made of lightweight aluminium, which does not hurt when worn. With the electrification of Agadez, stainless steel became a new, shiny and cheap alternative to silver. It just needed to be collected from the streets. Stainless steel is difficult to shape, but bracelets made from it are virtually indestructible. Tuareg blacksmiths melt and alloy scrap metal from a variety of sources, including old silver jewellery, bullet casings, tin cans and old car batteries. However, the choice of metals, as well as their names, such as black and white silver or dry and wet iron, is very much related to their materiality, taking into account properties such as malleability, weight, melting temperature, oxidation and accessibility of the raw material, as well as the needs of the object to be made (purpose, aesthetics, price, healing properties, sharpness, stability). The argument of the paper is based on long-term field research in Niger.

Contribution short abstract:

The paper examines how the Andean communities of the Puna and Atacama Desert reconfigure the use of tyres as waste from transportation, revealing sociocultural, economic, and infrastructural dynamics related to daily life and their inhabited environment.

Contribution long abstract:

Building on the shift from animal to motorised transport systems, the development of road infrastructure projects, and the emergence of a transportation market between the national borders of Chile and Bolivia, this paper invites attention to the omnipresence of tyres and the various dimensions of its existence. These dimensions transcend their initial “essence” or function related to transportation and mobility, revealing their “other” lives that arise from their form, meaning, and function.

By focusing on a material object such as the tyre, it is possible to uncover the underlying dynamics that shape the sociocultural life that defines life in the Atacama Desert and Mountain Range. Through its centrality in everyday life, we can observe transformations in productive modes, economies, infrastructures, as well as local-global and physical-symbolic interconnections, manifested in the construction of new functions and meanings in accordance with the complexities of life in the region. The objective of this paper is to analyse the appropriation of tyres as transportation waste by the Andean communities surrounding the international roads between Chile and Bolivia, as well as the various dimensions in which their new uses unfold.

Contribution short abstract:

Plastics are ubiquitous in migration and humanitarian contexts. Based on fieldwork in Necoclí, Colombia, this paper explores the afterlives of plastic, focusing on how migrants and locals repurpose waste into vital components of belonging and innovation, shaping new spatialities and temporalities

Contribution long abstract:

Plastic is ubiquitous in humanitarian contexts - bottles, chairs, shelters, and other objects flood refugee camps and emergency zones, while leaving lasting traces as waste. Despite its durability and resistance to decomposition, plastic is often dismissed as disposable. Roland Barthes described plastics as “miraculous” materials, infinitely moldable yet inherently artificial. Building on Barthes (1988), this paper examines plastic as both a material and a symbol that migrants and humanitarian actors alike repurpose and redesign.

Drawing on recent fieldwork in Necoclí, Colombia, where migrants begin their trek through the infamous Darien region, this paper explores how discarded plastic objects are transformed into tools for survival, spaces of belonging, and acts of innovation. Migrants and locals engage in a “humanitarian design from below,” reshaping waste into objects useful for their immediate but also long-term plans.

The analysis emphasizes the spatialities and temporalities of plastic, tracing how its persistence in the environment creates new challenges and opportunities. As waste becomes a resource, upcycling practices reveal how people imbue discarded materials with new values, crafting possibilities for belonging and social transformation. These material and social processes suggest a politics of plasticity, where adaptability and malleability reflect the flexibility of humanitarian bodies and relations, echoing Catherine Malabou’s concept of “a politics without chains (2021)”

Barthes, R. (1988). Plastic. in: Perspecta, 24, 92-93.

Malabou, C. (2021). Politics of Plasticity. Cooperation without Chains." In Unchaining Solidarity. On Mutual Aid and Anarchism edited by Dan Swain, 15-28. Blue Ridge Summit Rowman & Littlefield

Contribution short abstract:

This paper introduces autonomous goods; objects in autonomous/anarchist spaces that transition from discarded or devalued items to reclaimed, repurposed, and re-imagined goods not defined by arbitrary ownership; but their fluid use and relationships with the people and spaces that re-imagine them.

Contribution long abstract:

In this paper, I introduce the concept of autonomous goods, objects that transition from discarded or devalued items within capitalist systems to reclaimed and repurposed goods in autonomous spaces. These goods, ranging from food to furniture to bicycles, were discarded or donated because they no longer held valu within market logics. Upon entering autonomous spaces (such as the squat i researched in Prague), they were integrated into the collective’s anti-capitalist logics and thus not governed by traditional ownership or exchange values. Instead, their meanings and values were determined through usage and transformation by collective members driven by the space's needs, and governed by social norms, individual capacities, and decentralized autonomous actions.

The usage regimes were based on 'anarchist' autonomy, where individual actions were integrated within collective solidarity, mutual aid, and communal well-being. Goods were reconfigured and repurposed, altering their form, function, and value; and affected their usage rights as they moved through the space. While upcycling or usage provided individuals with control over items, this was temporary; defined by location, need, and current usage.

Autonomous goods are not defined arbitrarily by ownership, but by their ongoing relationship with the people and spaces that re-imagine them. Their autonomy lies in their fluidity – their ability to take on new roles and meanings based on the collective’s spontaneous needs. As such, these items are in constant flux, always being transformed or moving throughout the community; freely accessible to anyone, existing in a liminal state where they are simultaneously no one’s, yet everyone’s.

Contribution short abstract:

The paper examines how an upcycling fashion project inaugurated a new form of belonging and public visiblity for women in Germany's Ruhr that valued their stories of migration, inverting the normalized, everyday socio-spatial politics of Castrop-Rauxel.

Contribution long abstract:

The paper focuses on a participatory art project that emerged out of a cooperation between Berlin-based artist Nadin Reschke and the International Bildungs- und Kulturverein für Frauen (IBKF) based in Castrop-Rauxel. Thematically the project conjoined a resurgent interest in textiles and handicraft among contemporary artists with the current urban trend of “upcycling” in its idea to establish a fashion label among women with a “migration background,” one that would produce and sell clothing designed in relation to the women’s particular biographical histories. In this article, I draw upon writers in film theory and feminism to argue that this project offered these women a mode of resistance and agency, both in relation to the “fashion industry” and within the socio-spatial politics of small-town Germany. Within respect to the former, I argue that by expanding clothing into a set of narrative objects and relocating labor in the hands of these woman--who thus acted both producers as well as models--the project inaugurated two “communities of sense” – that is, two new trajectories for “what can be seen, what can be said, and what can be done.” (Rancière 49) In doing so, the project inverted the normal everyday socio-spatial politics of Castrop-Rauxel, offering to participants a mode of belonging to the public commons on the basis of their migration experience, rather than in spite of it. More broadly, the project exemplifies an alternative practice for revalorizing discards and leftovers that contrasts with the dominant logic and imagery of the Ruhr's post-industrial renaissance.