This article reconsiders how the organic, the symbolic, and matter are entangled by examining the relation between ethnographic accounts and non-human inscriptions in a post-industrial landfill. It aims at developing a way of engaging with the dynamism of residual matter at the conceptual level to expanding the range of possibilities of research on waste.

What we call garbography places the focus on the mattering of waste as a mode of inquiry, assuming that we can portray how waste expresses itself to our senses. However, the gesture of going beyond the anthropocentric bias unsettles the predominant meaning-centric understanding of fieldwork.

To practice garbography entails paying attention to the expressiveness of residual matter as an asemic inscription or graphein of sorts. It is thus to be involved in different exercises of tracing and speaking for material signs that might not be directly translatable to verbal language, yet allow us to venture into strange, stinky realms.

Through ethnographic examples from post-industrial Estonia (Kohtla mine, Sillamäe, Paljassaare), and art installations like Territory, Life in Decline, and Waste Side Story, the paper shows how waste landscapes operate as living archives that store ecological memory through chemical, microbial, and mineral inscriptions.

Decay, contamination, and ruin are not treated as heritage loss but as ongoing inscriptional activity, where more-than-human agencies develop a residual epistemology. Ultimately, the article advances a post-human heritage paradigm, where memory is maintained not through conservation but through acknowledging the expressive vitality of matter.

Keywords: Residual epistemology, discard studies, post-Industrial waste, more-than-human ethnography, asemic writing

Selected quotes:

“Not imposing meaning on our waste is a way to rethink how we relate to the world.” Pg. 6

“Waste-traces tend to be ‘additive’ rather than ‘reductive’—they form an extra layer on a surface rather than being scratched, etched, or scored on it.” Pg. 7

“Non-human sociality and salvaged expressions become accessible by practising garbography, entering the blurred terrain where neither nature nor culture are easily distinguishable.” Pg. 8

“We look at waste, not through it—assuming that rubble is able to narrate itself through a series of inscriptions and traces that are available to the senses in a wordless material way.” Pg. 13

“Decay might also be generative across artistic and scientific spheres—a necessary step in the process of an object to become heritage.” Pg. 15

“Garbography turns sensorially to expressions and inscriptions that occur after humans have abandoned landfills and industrial infrastructure.” Pg. 18