Gallix, Andrew, translator. “Trash, Or Tainted Culture” by Octave Debary. Hidden by the Surface: Works About Marine Debris. By Swaantje Güntzel, Herausgeber, 2017, pp. 6-11.

“. . . When Swaantje Güntzel offers us the incongruous spectacle of a cleaning lady diligently vacuuming a field (Staubsauger 2004), she is reminding us that nature produces no waste. This impurity is culture’s privilege, culture’s dirty “sin”, which is that of existence itself. The objective is to express one’s finitude and fear of loss — a loss culture wishes to lose: we seek to get rid of what we produce as it is also the source of our finitude. At the heart of this logic, waste enables us to express the passing of time and the end looming on the horizon; decay and dirt as depletions of life. This is where our contemporary eschatology, linked to environmental disasters, fits in. The more we live, producing ever more waste, the more we pollute the world (an immaculate nature?) where the danger to the environment always comes from culture. It is the border between waste and non-waste that makes our social and cultural condition possible. Waste’s exclusion from culture signals the end of a story that can no longer take place within a cultural context. It must be sacrificed (sacrum) because it is through this process of relinquishment that culture traces the boundary between what is pure and impure. Culture produces waste, which it then excludes. . . .” (original French text by Octave Debary)