The installation brings together scenography, architectural sculpture, digitally controlled woodworking, video slideshow, and sound collage to examine the environmental, material, and psychological consequences of urban waste, using Berlin as a case study. The exhibition traverses the city, reading its landscape in museological terms – considering how societies select urban artefacts for preservation, archiving, or conservation. It draws on the history of urban planning and city-cleaning practices, examining contemporary relations between reconstruction, waste, and urban development.

The term Stadtreinigung refers to the Berliner Stadtreinigungsbetriebe (BSR), one of Europe’s most significant municipal waste management institutions. The installation and accompanying works map infrastructures of waste management, scrap yards, wastewater treatment plants, landfills, and sites of wartime destruction, treating disposal practices as a framework for examining how value is assigned and organised within society.

The exhibition consists of two sculptural forms whose visual language draws on half- scale roll-off waste containers. It endeavours to capture man-made landscapes emptied of human presence, foregrounding traces of habitation and use. Recessed vitrines embedded within the lefthand side container houses fictional cameras, with viewfinders acting as peepholes leading to the screens beneath. The first video documents street-level refuse, while the second surveys processing facilities, wastelands, and construction sites. Enclosed speakers emit a collage of industrial construction and highway recordings, inviting engagement with waste as a multi-sensory phenomenon. The righthand side container functions as a fragmented partition, presenting bricolage sculptural forms that translate waste-management-related architecture into fragmentary models. While the slideshows depict observed reality, the sculptures introduce a speculative perspective, reframing contemporary waste-management technologies as artifacts of an uncertain future.

The project functions partly as a reflection on the methodologies of restoration and recycling in a broader sense, while also gesturing toward the excesses absorbed through screens, images, and contemporary modes of information consumption and processing. The resulting cacophony of images and sounds operates both literally – in relation to the subjects it depicts – and metaphorically, as a reflection of contemporary psychological landscapes.

– Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw

Grounded in urban geography, Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw’s artistic practice investigates the built environments that have shaped his way of seeing. Particular emphasis is placed on the interdependencies between urban centres and their hinterlands, tracing processes of urbanisation through which contemporary cities take shape. By following local waste- disposal systems and their distant, delayed, and often invisible consequences beyond city limits, the exhibition connects material flows at street level with global economic and cultural networks. Waste reflects everyday habits, values, and behaviours, while also materialising the effects of economic relations, global waste trade, and armed conflict. Systems of incineration, burial, or export abstract these processes, obscuring the scale of their impact.

The exhibition brings the urban refuse of the city into dialogue with social exhaustion, treating waste both as symptom and consequence of excess. It draws on the strategies of structuralist documentary film and scenographic staging, addressing the tensions surrounding urban cleansing. Moving through congested streets, it raises questions about the systems and values driving cycles of overproduction and consumption – one of the defining conditions of Berlin’s contemporary urban landscape and beyond.