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Octave Debary is an anthropologist, professor at the Université Paris Cité and director of the Centre d’anthropologie culturelle (SHS Sorbonne) and at the Université de Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where he teaches the anthropology of museums and art where he teaches the anthropology of museums and art. He is the author of some twenty books in which, through photography, museography and contemporary art, he questions the relationship between leftovers, waste and memory. His most recent publications include De la poubelle au musée, Une anthropologie des restes, preface by Philippe Descola (Créaphis, 2021) and Les fantômes de Christian Boltanski, (Créaphis, 2023).
Waste: art or the soiling of culture?
This conference will look at the work of German artist Swaantje Güntzel (http://www.swaantje-guentzel.de), whose works question the place and treatment of waste in and by culture, reintroducing it to its centre.She gathers and collects rubbish and returns it to the place where it was chased away, sometimes abandoned - in the middle of nature.The artist raises the question of the dirtying power of culture by reintroducing waste, in the form of a performance, in the middle of the shopping streets of European cities, their museums or sometimes in protected natural spaces such as lakes or forests. In so doing, she continues a line of questioning that artists such as Robert Smithson, Island for Broken Glass (1970) or, later, Jochen Gerz, Miami Islet (1998) have undertaken around the idea that waste, like art itself, both pose the paradoxical question of the undermining of culture as a condition of its affirmation.