Compound 13 Lab, Mumbai: learning through waste ecologies

The political ecologies of waste in Mumbai, like so many mega-cities across the global South, are built upon complex economies of informal waste work, underpinned by hidden networks, underacknowledged socio-spatial relationships, and subaltern lives. Every consumer object imaginable passes through the intricate supply chains that feed the recycling hubs of cities like Mumbai and Delhi: yet the hyper-consumption of these mass-produced products and who should be ultimately responsible for their disposal are rarely considered. Compound 13 Lab in Dharavi, Mumbai, built on a collaboration between a team of UK and Indian artist-researchers and local NGO ACORN India, creates spaces for shared learning that offer residents and young people opportunities to explore issues of waste, work, and survival using arts-based methods.

Compound 13 Lab extended ACORN’s established approaches in creative education and youth arts by inviting artists from a variety of backgrounds, including visual art, theatre, music and craft to work with ACORN’s young people, providing a platform in which to support an ambitious programme of creative engagement that included elements of design and innovation. The principal vehicle for this was an extended artist residency programme, which also supported early career social practice artists. Recent thinking on sustainability, circular economy, recycling and emissions reduction point to the introduction of new technological innovations in materials use and reuse, carbon capture projects and clean waste-to-energy solutions. C13 Lab offers a space where these emerging approaches can be brought into relationship with the ‘actually existing’ circular economy of cities.