SALVAGING FRAGMENTS:

MATERIAL TRANSFORMING MATTER IN A GERMAN

HOME AND A SCOTTISH EX-PLANT NURSERY.

DATE: 15.04.24
CANDIDATE: 2831059C
WORDCOUNT: 4113

Fig. 1 Crisp packet as light reflector, wire hoop for improving filter coffee machine.
Fig. 2 Wooden crates inside polytunnels, abandoned council planters in foreground.
 INTRODUCTION

What happens when a thing is made into another thing? Is it still the same thing, or has it
become something new? If the thing is combined with another thing, do they maintain their
distinct thingness, or is it lost in the whole of the new thing? These mereological questions
have been plaguing my enquiry into two subjects:

1. My late grandfather’s practice of making tools and augmentations to his home in

Germany, using things that had a prior function.
2. The gradual repurposing of a decaying ex-Glasgow City Council plant nursery, by the
organic food enterprise Locavore.

In this essay, I present the two subjects alongside each other in order to examine diverse
practices of salvage. In both cases, the stuff I write about has become visible because it is not
fulfilling its originally intended function, either via repurposing or decay. This builds on
Graham and Thrift’s engagement with Heidegger’s work, suggesting that tools become visible
when they stop working. Graham and Thrift extend this mechanism to infrastructures, I extend
the process of foregrounding to things that are not broken but that point to a previous
inadequacy or fault. By working through the practices of salvage that produce the things I’m
analysing, I find that there are often intuitive leaps present. It’s because of this creativity and
innovation associated with adaptation, that Graham and Thrift argue that maintenance and
repair “become one of our chief means of seeing and understanding the world.” (2007, p. 5) I
argue that the visibility of imagination in salvaged things is central to their attraction. My
enquiry has led me to see our material substrate as contingent: the world is made up through
associations which can be made and unmade. Geographers are well placed to attune their
analysis to the contingency of matter because of their interest in temporality and materiality
(DeSilvey & Edensor, 2013, p.480). In the transformation of things from one to another through
making, the relationality of meaning, function and matter is exposed. Salvaged matter makes
visible the striations of time in the material world, making them a useful way of accessing
histories.

LITERATURE

This investigation apprehends practices by looking at the objects involved in them. Schatzki
notes that, “because human activity is beholden to the milieus of nonhumans amid which it
proceeds, understanding specific practices always involves apprehending material
configurations.” (Knorr Cetina et al., 2001, p. 12) In attempting to understand what happens to
things when they are salvaged, and why I’m drawn to these practices, I’ve found a tension
between differing materialisms. Inspired by the careful work of Annemarie Mol (2002), I tried
tracing associations from the objects I observed (a comb—hair, buddleia bushes—imperial
botany, a traffic cone—council infrastructure). This method comes from Actor Network Theory
and draws on work by Latour (2005) and others which understands the world as networks of
relations that include human and nonhuman actors and can be described as materialist because
of the way it engages with the nonhuman. ANT proved useful for moving between scales of
analysis, for example linking the weeds growing at the Locavore site with colonial histories.
Closely related to ANT is new materialism which emphasises the vibrancy of matter, or the
lively role that the nonhuman plays in making the world (Bennett, 2009). This materialism in
less present in my analysis. The real divergence arose when I began trying to understand why
my Opa’s augmentations and the piles of stuff at Locavore made me feel such an intense
excitement and longing (I don’t think it’s an effect of grieving my Opa). For this question, the
work of cultural materialists (Williams, Sennett, Stoler, Benjamin?), who deal in structures of
feeling, was illuminating. Their work also pointed to the layered histories present in the matter
I was examining. Cultural materialists tend to employ abstract concepts which Actor Network
Theorists heavily criticize (Latour, 2005). In his progress report on cultural geography, Kirsch
(2013) considers these ‘overlapping strains of materialism,’ following the edgeless
proliferation of cultural and material turns within geography. Kirsch points out that, although
there are often significant differences between materialisms, “materialism seems to have
become irreproachable.” (p.435, emphasis original) He takes “a broader view of materialism
in cultural geography as an underlying philosophy of explanation and framework for
engagement—that which accords ontological priority to the material conditions of existence
and rejects non-material (e.g. spiritual, metaphysical and other transcendent) prime causes.”
(Kirsch, 2013, p.435). This broad view suits my analysis of how nonhuman things are reordered
and remade by practices of salvage. As I continue the metamorphosis from my training as an
artist into the discipline of human geography, Kirsch’s ‘irreproachable materialism’ is as
narrow a claim to any ontological or epistemological approach as I can make.

In order to evaluate the ‘overlapping strains of materialism’ in geography, Kirsch chooses to

survey research on value and waste, because it “highlights the transformative work of meaning-
making, cultural processes in the world.” (2013, p.434) These literatures are valuable for
making visible the constant becoming and un-becoming of material configurations. I’ll
consider how my Opa’s tools and augmentations, as things that have been drawn into surprising
new formations, highlight this contingency. The concept of dynamic repair, as used by Richard
Sennett (2008) emphasises the relationality of meaning, and in turn its mutability as material
relations are altered. The Locavore site in its simultaneous process of decay and dynamic repair
can be understood through literatures in geography on both ruin and repair (Graham & Thrift,
2007; Crang, 2010; DeSilvey & Edensor, 2013). Writing on ruin emphasizes the colonial debris
visible everywhere (Stoler, 2008). At Bellahouston, the plants that spring up in neglected areas
point to colonial legacies, as does the setting within the park. I explore the way collaged and
decaying or repurposed objects can sensitize us to personal and collective histories. It is the
broken and decaying that reveals “the unheralded centrality of the continuous, ongoing
maintenance and repair of the material world.” (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013, p. 477). With the
aid of these literatures, my analysis of salvage practices tugs at questions of how our world is
made, maintained and un-made.
 METHODS

Through this preliminary research, I’m attempting to begin to develop a theory of practices of
salvage making. In the introduction to The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (2001),
Theodore R. Schatzki defines ‘theory’ as a “general, and abstract account” (p.12) but stresses
that “practice thinkers…are generally suspicious of ‘theories’ that deliver general explanations
of why social life is as it is.” (p.13). There is a challenge then to stay with the particular and to
go beyond giving a descriptive account. In order to construct my account, I draw on
remembered conversations and notes taken during site visits. Photographs have been a valuable
aid for staying with the particularities of objects and sites, allowing me to carefully interrogate
the constellations of things in place without succumbing to the generalizations of memory.
From here, I’ve followed associations to wider historical and political contexts. The kinds of
experiences I recall often emphasise embodied engagements with things and places—using
Opa’s tools, digging at Locavore. In their survey of geography research on ruins and ruination,
DeSilvey and Edensor (2013) point to the value of experimental embodied engagements with
these sites that “rarely lend themselves to representation in seamless narratives,” (p.479). I
attempt to lean into these multi-sensory memories in what follows.

My decision to write about two subjects, which are both distinct from each other and my
planned dissertation fieldwork, is inspired by work in geography on fragments (McFarlane,
2021; Thieme, 2021). McFarlane has experimented with writing in fragments to draw together
divergent research fields. He points to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1999) to consider
what can be gained from presenting fragments alongside each other, though he stops short of
following Benjamin’s method of literary montage, that “needn't say anything. Merely show.”
(1999, [Nla,8]) Attending to fragments in geography is a method for reflecting on parts of
fieldwork that sit outwith the engagements sanctioned by ordinary research papers and
publications. Thieme (2021) places diverse ethnographic encounters alongside each other in a
process of reflection between fields. She calls this ‘ethnographic cross-pollination.’ (2021,
p.1092) This approach has been helpful for rethinking the boundaries of the field and what
should be considered ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the research process (Katz, 1994). These investigations
form part of my preparation for fieldwork in Eastern Indonesia, where I’ll be looking for
salvage practices in the irrigation methods of farmers living by the Batu Bulan Dam. This
follows time spent in the region last year. In his Manifesto for Incomparable Geographies,
Jazeel (2019) examines the relationship between urban geography research in the Global North
and South and argues that “a methodological disposition toward singularity, toward the
particular, might well help to facilitate the decolonization of geographical knowledge
production.” (2019, p.6) My intention here, then, is not to establish a familiar context against
which to compare my findings in Indonesia, so that this research in the Global South becomes
“a kind of empirical conscript to a theoretical modernity that remains firmly in the Euro
American academy.” (Jazeel, 2019, p.6). Instead, I hope that, by beginning with contexts that
I have a more intimate relationship to, I can guard against exceptionalizing and romanticizing
the salvage practices that I observe in Indonesia.
 I TRITTENHEIMER WEG, SAARBRÜCKEN, GERMANY

Fig. 3 Computer fan blows hot air up the stairs.

Fig. 4 Egg shell softens lightbulb.

In the autumn of last year, my grandfather fell gravely ill. He had been slowing down since my
grandmother’s death and took his diagnosis as a sign that it was time to go. During this period,
I travelled to Germany to be with him and my family a number of times. Between moments at
Opa’s bedside, we wandered the house that had been home to three generations of the family.
Opa had not been particularly vocal, his presence was felt more in the peculiar adjustments he
made to the house and the improvised tools he made and positioned, ready to hand. These
augmentations (or ‘gadgets’, as my aunt calls them) became the locus of translation between
members of a family uncertain of how to grieve together. We followed our impulse to document
them before the house was emptied. Some of the augmentations had an easily readable
function. Others were less transparent, and I had to seek explanation from my cousins. Opa's
tools and augmentations, although always zuhanden (ready-at-hand) become vorhanden
(present-to-hand/objectively present) because of their opacity. (Graham and Thrift, 2007, p. 2)
It is possible to categorise the adjustments as tools and augmentations: tools being things that
need to be used by a person to fulfil their function and augmentations being things that are
functional without the need for action.

Some augmentations: crisp packets are opened flat and pinned to the wall behind lamps,
so that their silvery inside reflects light; a computer fan hung in a doorway encourages
hot air from the basement to the living room.

Some tools: a broken fork screwed into a hazel stick from the nearby woods makes a
leaf picker for the lawn; a ribbon with a paperclip on the end can be pinned so that,
when leaving the basement, it brushes your face—this reminded Opa to switch off the
light.
I will consider what happens to the objects when they are repurposed, drawing on the
temporality of matter theorized in literatures of waste and repair (Crang, 2010; Graham &
Thrift, 2007; Kirsch, 2013). Next, I will consider the relationship between embodied
knowledge and ‘intuitive leaps’ in the practice of making the tools and augmentations(Sennett,
2008). Finally, I’ll consider how attention to these salvaged things can speak to both a personal
and regional history of industry and manufacturing.

Fig. 5 & 6 Crisp packet as light reflectors in bathroom.

What happens to the crisp packet when it is used as a light reflector? Scissors and sticky tape
construct a new material configuration that includes the lamp and the wall. Post-
cannibalization, it still retains enough of its crisp packet-ness for this prior function to be
recognisable (Graham and Thrift, 2007, p. 6), but it would no longer by any good for holding
crisps. Usually, the packet would become waste once empty of crisps, but here it has been
withdrawn from the expected phases in the life of an object (Scanlan, 2005, p.5 in Thieme,
2021, p.1093). Literatures on waste and repair use examples like this to highlight the social
construction of waste (Moore, 2009 in Thieme, 2021, 1093) but there is a broader implication
for understanding meaning as relational. After photographing them, we removed the shiny
pieces of plastic from the walls and put them in the bin: no longer crisp packet, or light reflector,
they became waste. Most of the augmentations either became waste, material ready for use
(e.g. a ribbon) or reverted to their prior function (see coin in fig.8), when removed from the
configurations in which my Opa had placed them. His practice of salvage demonstrated that
‘the perceived loss of use or exchange value in an object does not infer ‘end of life’ but rather
the end of imagination.” (Thieme, 2021, p.1093). This suggests possibilities for things beyond
the narrow confines of exchange value: the world can be unmade and remade because meaning
is relational, and relations can be changed. The objects which I’ve called tools tended to be
more stable configurations, they didn’t change function when moved.
 Fig. 7 Family group chat. Image of flooring. Message reads ‘Highly likely that this is grandpa’s handywork.
Clothes pegs as spacers.’
Fig. 8 Coin on radiator shelf holds hanger in place for Opa to warm his clothes in the mornings.

Resting on the dresser in the dining room is a wide-tooth comb fastened to a long stick. Opa
would take it down to comb out the fringe of the rug, sometimes letting the children have a go.
You can buy purpose made combs for rug fringes, but Opa’s Fransenkamm was more fun.
There is ingenuity in this adaptation of a tool to a new purpose. Richard Sennett (2008) writes
about the movement of tools from one domain to another in order to enact dynamic repair.
Sennett believes that thinking and feeling can happen through making (2006, p.6). When I think
about these objects, I can picture my Opa using them and his frequent physical comedy, this is
memory of the embodied relationship to these tools. Sennett divides his account of the ‘intuitive
leaps’ needed to repurpose tools and practice into four stages: reformatting, considering
different uses for a tool or practice; adjacency, bringing two unlike domains together; surprise,
as you use tacit knowledge in comparing; finally, gravity, or recognising that not all problems
are solved by this transfer (2008, p.209-211). In describing the stage of surprise, Sennett adds
that “it’s at this point that the maker begins to experience wonder.” (p.211) These objects make
visible the ingenuity and imagination that is present in practices of making. The adjacency that
they produce between domains are like visual jokes, an absurd shortcut is made between two
things and meanings—a comb and a carpet, hair and a rug fringe—the familiar is made strange.

This essay is an exercise in remembering, the tools and augmentations act as “an interface
between personal and collective memory, as material remains mediate between history and
individual experience.” (DeSilvey & Edensor, 2013, p.472). Although I am focusing on my
Opa’s handiwork, practices of salvage are widespread within the region. My family is from
Saarbrücken, a small city which historically had a significant coal mining and steel industry.
The state is otherwise made up mostly of small towns and villages set within an agricultural
landscape. One iconic invention of the region is the Schwenker, a barbecue grill tripod that was
traditionally made from steel poles brought home by workers from the steel works. My Opa
was born in 1936 and I wondered if the trauma and scarcity of those early years had influenced
my grandparents’ habit of holding on to everything. Graham & Thrift (2007) emphasise that
innovative repairs “are often the result of long and complex apprenticeships and other means
of teaching.” (p. 4) My aunt would agree: Opa trained as a car mechanic, an apprenticeship in
precise engineering, she thinks it’s this knowledge of a craft and the associated creativity that
produced the augmentations.

II LOCAVORE, BELLAHOUSTON PARK, GLASGOW

Fig. 9 Stacks of crates at entrance to shredded polytunnel.

On Thursdays, I work at a community garden in Bellahouston Park, in the Southside of
Glasgow. From my vantage point in a Victorian era walled garden, I can see the artificial ski
slope, the Charles Renée Mackintosh inspired House for an Art Lover, the Prince of Wales
Hospice, and, just before the park ends and the view opens onto the city centre, a complex of
giant greenhouses and polytunnels. This ex-council plant nursery was acquired by the organic
food enterprise Locavore in 2022 on a twenty-year lease. Last year, I worked on the site
supervising Community Payback groups to help clear an area for growing. Since my first visit,
I have been returning to snoop around the semi-ruined structures. I’ve brought friends along to
bask in the warm, dry quiet of the giant greenhouses and attempt to make sense of old irrigation
plans and piles of stuff everywhere. In my analysis of the site, I begin by considering what
literatures on ruin might tell us about this decaying infrastructure which is being repurposed
for a new use. I then look more closely at how the plant growth forms part of the collage of
time on the site. There is a repeated turn towards embodiment in my discussion of the Locavore
site. My experience there has been shaped by working with the Community Payback crews in
the first warm weeks of last year. We were attuned to how that particular area caught the sun,
and how other parts of the site were cool and shady, as we would not have been simply walking
around. More recently, I’ve returned to the shredded polytunnels to collect plastic for making
kites and to decorate the venue of an event I’m planning with my art collective. These
engagements with the site are grounded in making, following Sennett, this shapes my thinking
about the possibilities of the site, validating the need for more imaginative research methods
alongside standard site visits and visual analysis.

Fig. 10 Back of Locavore site: pallets, children’s slide, traffic cones, RBS sculpture, fencing panels, shipping
container.
Although the site has been steadily tidied up and put to use since Locavore’s acquisition, there
is still a distinct air of decay here. A row of polytunnels is severely shredded and, inside one
greenhouse, a young silver birch reaches up to the roof, piles of stuff dumped by the council
have accumulated behind the hangar where veg boxes are packed. There is a giant baobab tree
sculpture with the Royal Bank of Scotland logo on its trunk, could this be debris from when
the COP26 was held in Glasgow? Elsewhere, council branded tree-planters have become
overgrown with diverse vegetation. In writing about my Opa’s practices, I’ve emphasized the
continual becoming of material configurations, here, I’d like to focus on un-becoming,
following Graham and Thrift’s (2007) assertion that “disconnection and disassembly are just
as important [as connection and assembly] in that they resist entities’ means of enacting
themselves: failure is key.” (Graham & Thrift, 2007, p. 7) The Locavore site shows a
repurposing of infrastructure made obsolete by a shrinking park service. The work of
maintenance and repair of urban space is often done by community payback crews. These
crews no longer exist within my organization because the council was not able to pay us
enough. Graham and Thrift argue that “it is in this space between breakdown and restoration
of the practical equilibrium – between the visible (that is, ‘broken’) tool and the concealed tool
– that repair and maintenance, makes its bid for significance.” (Graham and Thrift, 2007, p. 3)
The explosion of writing on ruins and ruination over the last three decades, both in geography
and elsewhere (DaSilvey & Edensor, 2013) emphasises these processes. I’d like to steer away
from the more “regressive politics and aestheticized passivity” (DeSilvey & Edensor, 2013,
p.467) that Ruinenlust can be associated with. Ruins have radical implications as spaces of
continual transformation, outside sensible ordering (Somers Hall, 2009 in DeSilvey & Edensor,
2013, p.466). The piles of stuff at Locavore demand attention because of this disorder. The
Locavore site highlights architectures as "morphogenetic figures forged in time, tacking against
a general entropic tendency". (Graham and Thrift, 2007, p. 6)

Fig. 11 Council tree planters, last year’s buddleia flowerheads in foreground.

When salvaging, the complications encountered in material remnants reveal lots about the
history of a place. Stoler (2008) writes that attention to ruins can address “more protracted
imperial processes that saturate the subsoil of people’s lives and persist, sometimes subjacently,
over a longer duree.” (p. 192) Colonial logics are present in the vegetation and the very ground
of the site. One of the plants that sprouts everywhere here is buddleia, it was brought to Britain
from China in the 1890s and is now often one of the first plants to grow in places left to waste.
This is just as much a reminder of the colonial history of Glasgow as the architectural and
landscape remnants of the Empire Exhibition, held here in 1938, or the large houses that stretch
for two kilometres towards my flat. This long relationship between plants and colonialism is
also present in the stratifications of the ground of the site. When attempting to clear some land
for growing on with the Community Payback crews, we pulled up young trees and grass and
jaggy nettles (brambles) to find not earth, but layers of gravel, sand and plastic membrane.
Inside the greenhouses, the floor is concrete. Anna Tsing has written about the colonial origins
of these growing practices that separate plants from their environment (Tsing, 2012). The
Locavore flower grower told me that the council used to put out young plants from the
greenhouses to harden off here, so they kept it weed free. She just adds organic matter and
grows on top. It’s fascinating to see the contrast between the council’s historic methods and
Locavore’s more weed and wildlife friendly approach to the site. In considering the human
histories of vegetation and ground in my analysis, I follow Whatmore’s description of a “return
to the livingness of the world [that shifts] the register of materiality from the indifferent stuff
of a world ‘out there’, articulated through notions of ‘land’, ‘nature’, or ‘environment’ to the
intimate fabric of corporeality that includes and redistributes the ‘in here’ of human being.” (
p.602) By attempting to make use of the ground, or observing Locavore’s ways of doing so,
layers of time and historical practices are revealed.

Fig. 12 Concrete ground of one area of the greenhouses has been excavated.
 CONCLUSION

This essay has been an experiment in not-quite fieldwork, presenting fragments alongside each
other to see what happens. Rather than writing a comparison of my Opa’s practices of salvage
and the repurposing of the plant nursery, I have sought to emphasise the situated specificity of
practices and avoid generalizations. The claim I want to stake, is that attention to the making
of new things with salvaged material, can help us to identify the instability of material relations
and meaning. Reflecting on this preliminary research, I’ve noted that it can be easy to get
carried away with concepts presented in literatures, the challenge is to keep returning to the
research material, making broader transformations possible. Photographs are incredibly helpful
for this, so is picking out specific objects within the field. The discussion of my grandfather’s
practices of augmentation and tool making have expanded on literatures of repair and
maintenance, and tool use. In examining the Locavore site as one of simultaneous decay and
repurposing, I have emphasized the temporality of material, the world as always becoming and
un-becoming. This site also presented histories of colonialism latent in vegetation and growing
practices. Both instances of research have explored practices by examining the objects involved
in the practices, as they are changed by human and nonhuman activity (Shatzki, 2001, p.12).
This will aid my field work on irrigation systems in Eastern Indonesia, where the human and
nonhuman coproduce the object of analysis.
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