Mourning Trash and Haunting Bodies

A Comparative Dialogue Between Modern Finnish Waste Discourse and Classical Japanese Courtly Tales

_Dialogue A philosopher, P, and a Japanologist, J, walk together down the riverbank of the Aura, in Turku, Finland. It’s an early spring afternoon, cold but clear. Old snow and pebbles punctuate the cobblestones by the still naked trees. P: Finland is so clean; there’s hardly any trash on the streets. And we have the cleanest air in the world, did you know? [1] We have all the health benefits of clean air and clean cities, like better sleep and a better mood. The place in the world with the cleanest air is actually in Finland, in Pallas-Yllästunturi National Park. [2] Here, we pay a lot of attention to cleanliness. Clean air, water, and food. You can even pick berries and mushrooms in the forests and eat them; [3] that’s how clean Finland is. J: It really sounds almost utopian when you look at all the information from national and local websites! And yet, it is interesting to consider when we think of something as dirt. Look at this gravel scattered all through the streets. In winter it makes paths safer and cleaner. But in spring, when the snow melts, it becomes dirt and dust. P: A lot of Finnish street cleaning discourse is devoted to when and how the stones should be cleaned in the spring. [4] You could say this is an example of dirt as “matter out of place.” [5] This is a concept popularized by Mary Douglas in the 1960s, but she didn’t originate it. It was a pre-existing Victorian phrase, employed in a speech by British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), talking about urban planning ideals. [6] At this time, England was dealing with an ‘urban blight’ where rapid industrialization and inequality caused destitute urban dwellers to live in close quarters in unsanitary living conditions. Waste management was insufficient for such large groups of people in such small areas, and Lord Palmerston’s position was that natural byproducts were essentially good. The problem was not waste itself (as human and food waste make perfectly good fertilizer if managed properly), but waste management. [7] J: From how you are talking, I thought you were going to tell me the bodies living in close quarters were the matter out of place and not the waste they produced! Because both waste and bodies are like this gravel we were talking about. They could fulfil particular social functions when organized…

Love, Later

Making Space for New Romantic Relationships in Later Life

1_Introduction: Influencer Grandmas, Golden Bachelors, and the Retired Runner Nextdoor Meet Grandma Droniak. At 95 years old, she has an enviable social media following—15 million on TikTok and nearly four million on Instagram—and she uses her platforms to entertain and inform about later-life love. [29] A widow who enjoyed 48 years of marriage with her late husband, she’s since re-entered the dating world and chronicled her adventures with the help of her manager and grandson, Kevin. She wrapped up 2023—one of her spiciest relationship years yet—with a video highlighting her accomplishments: getting a new boyfriend, ghosting sub-par suitors, and dumping a dishonest man. She even discovered, when one man quit returning her calls and texts and seemed to be ghosting her, that he’d in fact died and “turned into a ghost.” [30] In her hometown of Shelton, Connecticut, she has found companions at bars, bingo nights, and even funerals, but she also turns to social media to scout for boyfriends. While she is known for her sarcasm and humour, she also chronicles the more serious side of love through moments like getting ready to attend her ex-boyfriend’s funeral. Always one to remind her followers that life is short and time is precious, she tells them that once she’s dead, she wants them to “slay while I decay.” [31] Although ‘grandfluencer’ Grandma Droniak is an exceptional figure in the world of influencers and relationship advisors—by virtue of her age, her viral popularity, and the blunt humor she uses to deliver her messages—she is not the only public figure bringing attention to new romantic relationships in later life. Now completing its second season in the United States, and its first in Australia, The Golden Bachelor—a spinoff of the long-running reality series, The Bachelor—introduces eligible women in their sixties and up to a single, sought-after man with the hope of kindling a lasting romance. And while fans of the franchise were disappointed that the series’ inaugural couple, Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist, have ended up divorced and are fighting over relationship revelations in Gerry’s newly published memoir, many fans are at least thankful that the series has put later-life relationships (LLRs) on the map. Indeed, in a less sensational way than the Golden Bachelor’s ‘rose ceremonies’ (i.e., contestant elimination) and Grandma Droniak’s salty commentaries, other voicesre making space for LLRs. In one of the New York Times’ most-read “Modern Love” columns, journalist Eve…

Reenactments and the Politics of Remembrance

A Tribute to Ana Mendieta, 40 Years after Her Death

1_Introduction On September 8th, 2025, I invited a group of friends to join me in a private tribute. They were told to meet me in a laboratory room at the theater department of the University of Giessen, Germany. An empty chair was placed at the center of the space, lit with dimmed lights. In the back, a wooden board leaned against the wall. The board had a long white sheet of paper attached to it. Beside it, some painting supplies were lying on the floor. A candle was lit next to a white rose in the foreground. I greeted my friends who had joined. I told them that, that night, I would present a tribute. Not a lecture, not a performance, but a tribute to Ana Mendieta, 40 years after her death. [57] Born in Havana and exiled to the U.S. at the age of twelve, Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) became a prominent voice of the 1970s feminist art movement. Her ‘earth-body art’ combined elements of ‘land art’ and ‘body art,’ transforming her experience as a woman into the central theme of her work. [58] In so doing, she challenged Western conceptions of both ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ as she described in a notorious statement about her work: For the last 12 years I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast out of the womb (Nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source. Through the making of earth/body works I become one with the earth. It is like being encompassed by nature, an afterimage of the original shelter within the womb. [59] Mendieta’s art speaks of her desire to reunite with the universe, return to the maternal source, and, finally, find shelter within the earth. Her rhetoric on nature combines elements of an early ecofeminist discourse with ideas of the so-called ‘goddess art movement’ of the 1970s. [60] At the same time, her method of exploring earth as a female body foreshadows a pluriversal approach to nature, drawing on pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico and Cuba, and asserting her identity as Other within the predominantly white feminist movement of her time. For all these reasons, Mendieta’s oeuvre remains an important body…

Perrear hasta el piso or How to Dance Reggaetón in Germany

_Introduction: We Are Going to La Casa del Perreo Before any farra [Spanish for ‘party’], I avoid listening to the music that will be played that night. Like a cabala [rituals and superstitions for good luck], I feel it is better to listen later. Los temas, the song’s hits, are to be enjoyed at the momento and not before. Instead, on the night of the party, I was listening to a podcast. The time was 21:04 and the train from Giessen to Frankfurt departed with a ten-minute delay. After fifteen minutes, I heard someone speaking Spanish. I turned to my left. A woman appeared to be talking on the phone. I could not identify her accent, but I was sure she was Latina. She ended the call and returned to her seat. She might be going to the farra, I thought. The party tonight would be my second time in La Casa del Perreo, a Latin event created by a community of DJs (Mexicans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, sometimes German DJs are invited). I have been following them for two years before I came to Germany. My first time at this farra was in winter, in early January. It was my first party after I arrived in Germany, and after seven months without celebrations. Then I wanted to dance. I was excited to see how Latin American people dance far from home, in the German winter. Inside, a crowd contrasted with the empty streets. Now, summer had come, and I had high expectations. I noticed how people change in summer. They seem more free and relaxed to me. What is more, the warm weather reminds me of the tropical mode of the Latin American Caribbean. The event was promoted on the collective’s social media as the best Latin party in the country, and hundreds of comments on Instagram concurred with this statement. [94] Fig. 1: Instagram post of an event in Munich, February 26, 2026, @lacasadelperreo.eu, © La Casa del Perreo The venue, Fortuna Irgendwo, is situated in the heart of Frankfurt Ostend. The building used to be a boiler house built in 1906. From 1999 to 2013, it was the prestigious King Kamehameha Club, which won several awards in its heyday, such as “Bar of the Year.” After the pandemic, this venue became a disco. Instead of live music, it started to host various music events throughout the year,…

Black Joy as Cultural Resistance

On Celebration and Visibility in When We See Us

The exhibition When We See Us at the Kunstmuseum Basel celebrates a century of Black figurative painting, offering a sweeping homage to Black Joy, positioned far beyond the aestheticized trauma and stereotyped suffering so often imposed upon Black subjects in European cultural institutions. More than a collection of artworks, the exhibition offers a curatorial and affective experience: an invitation to encounter joy as a force of resistance, intimacy, and self-definition. The title, When We See Us, a deliberate echo of Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, already signals a reversal of gaze. Where they cast their vision upon Black life, this exhibition turns the lens inward: when we see us is both an epistemic act and a political claim. It is a reorientation of visual sovereignty. Curated by Tandazani Dhlakama and Koyo Kouoh, the exhibition brings together over 200 works by artists from across the Pan-African and diasporic spectrum, mapping 100 years of Black figuration through scenes of leisure, love, spirituality, domesticity, and collective rest. The exhibition is not the representation of Blackness as absence, brokenness, or spectacle. Rather, it is what Stuart Hall would call a “politics of representation” that insists on multiplicity, affect, and self-making. [130] Black Joy, in this exhibition, is not treated as an emotion alone but as a methodology, a visual grammar of presence, survival, and imagination. Drawing on Hall, we might say this is not about “finding the real” but about showing how identity is constructed, felt, and claimed in the act of celebration itself. [131] The exhibition’s refusal to center trauma resonates deeply with bell hooks’ call for an “oppositional gaze:” a way of seeing that resists dominance and reclaims the terms of looking. [132] Here, the gaze is not merely returned, it is shared. One sees and is seen. This mutuality is enacted not just through portraiture but through the spatial choreography of the exhibition: vibrant color palettes, layered listening zones, moments of stillness, and warmth. In such an environment, joy is not a frivolous affect but a quiet demand, a mode of staying alive and staying seen. As a biracial cultural researcher working at the intersection of visual studies, digital ethnography, and urban Black cultural spaces, I approached the show not only as an observer but also as someone deeply attuned to the textures and politics of Black self-representation. My viewing was not neutral. It was embodied, relational, charged. Moving through…