New York’s network infrastructure is a lot like the city itself: messy, sprawling, and at times near-incomprehensible. However, the city’s tendency toward flux is a strange blessing for the infrastructure sightseer: markings and remnants of the network are almost everywhere, once you know how to look for them.

The installation Chiefs of Waste, by Shay Raviv and Dorota Gazy from STBY, presents a global investigation delving into the ever-changing worlds of waste pickers in Mexico City and Bangalore, uncovering the networks, actors and structures that span the blurry lines between formal and informal systems. The exhibition is on show during the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven from 19 October until 27 October 2019.

From satellite graveyards to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, GEO—DESIGN: Junk. explores global systems of discarded things and their new realities and potentialities. This city-wide exhibition, produced in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum, showcases 18 projects by DAE alumni.

With strikingly different approaches to design and research, the exhibition traverses landfills, uncovers the ghosts of dead digital communities and discovers new ecosystems and economies built on detritus. It looks at junk as a microcosm, as an economic barometer that can reveal realities of consumption and production, and as a subject of intercontinental diplomacy.