Working with What’s Already There: From Collection to a Policy on Materials

Food, clothing, and shelter are the material conditions of all existence. Yet the industries that ensure our subsistence have become drivers of productivism and extractivism. How can we break free from a system that destroys the ecological conditions on which it depends?

This conference proposes starting with simple actions—gathering, gleaning, and salvaging—to envision a different relationship with materials. On both an individual and metropolitan scale, gathering reveals the resources already present in our cities and regions. Reuse, maintenance, repair, and reconditioning then become the foundations of a materials policy based on caring for what already exists rather than on the extraction of new resources.