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Short abstract:

This presentation will draw on the display cultures of a scrap market in Delhi, India to present a situated and particular archive and sense of technological experimentation, labor, and the city by whose who create "scrap" - techno-commercial entities that emerge from the dismantling of machines.

Long abstract:

India’s capital city, Delhi, is home to one of the country's largest scrap metal markets. Here, discarded industrial and automotive machines are gathered, dismantled, cleaned, piled, segregated and transformed into scrap, parts, and other kinds of commodities that are sold. Its networks reach far beyond the city, across land and sea. I posit the scrap market as an experimental space and phenomenal site to engage with alternative histories of technological inquiry and experimentation and as a space of legitimate work and trade. Drawing on the display cultures of the market, I explore the aesthetics of expertise, the conveyance of excess, the display of inventory, and invocations of affect through the description of different visual structures and forms present throughout the market. These present a particular archive and sense of the city created by those who labor to create “scrap”, techno-commercial entities that blur the boundary between production and consumption, between work and trade, and between raw material, commodity, and waste. I explore how these visual arrangements interrogate notions of belonging, pollution, innovation, power, and possibilities for the continuous (re)making of the city. Scrap and its transformation and trade provides fertile ground to think alongside junk and its manifestations in the global south.