The Lifespan Project, one of our four 2024 Proposal Development Grant teams, interrogates the concept of lifespan in things material and immaterial as it looks at the used, rotten, and obsolete; death and grief through three intersecting stories.
Composed of undergraduate students in Architecture and English, graduate students from Comparative Literature, and three faculty members from Architecture; AfroAmerican andAfrican Studies; English; and Women’s and Gender Studies, the Lifespan team worked on a triptych video inspired by Sea Vertigo: a three-channel video installation by Ghanaian-born British artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah. The Lifespan Project brought together three distinct stories – at once personal and collective – from France, Ghana, and the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.
Mireille Roddier is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Architecture. Her narrative takes us to her family farmhouse in Burgundy, France, as she reflects on a bygone era of local energy autonomy and sustainably regenerative subsistence that neither necessitated the importation of externally produced goods nor the consequential exportation of waste. She uses the commodification of water as an opportunity to reflect on the larger question of sewage and general waste accumulation in the modern world.
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Bénédicte Boisseron, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Chair of the Department of Aftroamerican and African Studies, ties her brother’s untimely passing to an environmental scandal in the French Caribbean Islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Through reflections on the colonial role of pesticide in banana plantations which contaminated local waters and soils, Boisseron addresses her personal grief while interrogating the lifespan of human life, colonial history, and a banana.
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Meg Sweeney, Professor of English; Afroamerican and African Studies; and Women’s and Gender Studies, traveled to Accra, Ghana with graduate student CC Barrick, to learn more about the devastating environmental and labor consequences of “dead white man’s clothes”: vast quantities of secondhand clothing—at least 40% of which is deemed textile waste—sent to Ghana every week from the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and Europe. Meg and CC interacted with a broad range of people associated with Kantamanto Market: the largest secondhand market in Ghana, including young women who head-carry bales of used clothing, market sellers, up-cyclers, importers, beach cleaners (who try and mitigate the impact as waste collects on beaches and, in some cases, stutters local waterways), waste management professionals, and community organizers.
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Through the theme of water, The Lifespan Project’s triptych film offers a powerful reflection on the human and environmental dimensions of consumption, waste, circularity, and reuse. The team is planning to present their project as an exhibit at the Taubman School of Architectures “Climate Future” Symposium October 17-18.