BODIES OF WASTE/CORPI DI SCARTO

Dharavi isn't just the largest asian slum. It's the heart of Mumbai, or rather, its gut: the place where the city expels, digests, and transforms its waste before reintroducing it into the cycle. One of the planet's most extensive and complex informal recycling systems operates here. According to various estimates, up to 80% of Mumbai's solid waste is generated through informal collection and processing networks. In the slum, the boundaries between private, public and productive space are osmotic. Thresholds are flexible; every inch is optimized, reconvertible.

Dharavi is an organism that feeds on what the world rejects and, from this dead matter, generates value, work, and relationships. A process that embodies, in a terrible and wonderful way, the Freudian dialectic between Eros and Thanatos: the drive that creates and the drive that dissolves. We explore Dharavi as a biological body traversed by these two primordial forces: one that transforms waste into a resource, and the other that dissolves into fumes and toxic substances, into bodies worn out by work. We follow the entire recycling process as a continuous flow—from waste collection to transportation, from sorting to processing, up to regeneration. Through this journey, the central paradox will emerge: recycling prolongs the life of objects while shortening that of those who transform them, revealing the tragic and invisible side of urban sustainability. Here, the world cleanses itself by sublimating its own death elsewhere.