Trash as a Means of Religious Communication

Warm Greetings to the General Heathen Public from the Toxic Temple

Fig. 1: Mundane ritualistic life at the Toxic Temple, Donaufestival 2023, © David Visnjic Trash inhabits an ambivalent, almost contradictory discursive place in our society. On the one hand, ‘trash’ is what we consider not-worthwhile, ephemeral, and uninteresting. Movies, novels, or other products regarded as ‘trash’ are believed to contain little of lasting value—one might enjoy consuming them, but they will have no historic or cultural impact. Similarly, in consumer goods, ‘trash’ is often what is wrapped around the desired product, protecting one’s purchase from the outside world; once its seal is broken and the product obtained, its packaging loses all value. When you rush into the supermarket to pacify your bodily needs—buying a premade sandwich, for example—what encloses your desired good hardly registers your attention; you tear the plastic open and gulp down the sandwich, noticing little about the wrapping before you dispose of it in a nearby trash-can. …That is, you would act that way if you were still what we of the Toxic Temple [1] consider a ‘heathen’: somebody who has not yet recognized our modern consumer trash as communication with the afterlife, and every act of disposing of it as a prayer to eternity. Whereas within a still-majoritarian, individualist consumer logic of heathens, trash is ephemeral and epiphenomenal, from a larger-than-human, geological point of view, trash is what will outlive us. Trash is the durable and lasting element of our consumer culture. The plastic wrapping of my sandwich will leave traces on the face of the Earth for almost infinitely longer than the time I spent enjoying my sandwich, longer than the time my meandering intestines took to digest it and shit it out again, even longer than it will take the body that once held these intestines to decay and decompose, next to the shit that I produced as long as I was alive. In the Toxic Temple, we try to reconcile our lost ways of ecocidal modern consumer life with these cosmological consequences: we whisper humble prayers when we bid farewell to the plastic container of our frail organic nutrition—solemnly admiring the longevity of its material and the long-lasting effects it has on the order of the cosmos turned chaosmos. What heathens consider ‘trash’ in fact embodies our culture itself—in all its achievements and failings—for far longer than do the human bodies and minds that are conventionally considered to be the agents of cultural production.…