/ DISSONANCE

Spring 2023

digital video, color, sound, 03:25 min.

Dissonance is a reflection on the intimate and systemic realities of waste in the United States. It began as a response to my experiences volunteering in Chester, Pennsylvania—a predominantly Black community burdened by the toxic emissions of waste-processing industries like the Covanta Incinerator—and my studies in Swarthmore College’s Our Trash course. These spaces, where the everyday and the catastrophic collide, reveal the quiet violence of waste systems: mountains of trash, fumes of burning plastic, and the long shadows of environmental harm that perpetuate generational inequities.

Set against the soulful warmth of Thee Sacred Souls’ Can I Call You Rose?, the film weaves found footage, soft sculptures, and atmospheric sound into a meditation on care, memory, and responsibility. The juxtaposition of reclaimed materials with the raw realities of waste-processing sites transforms discarded objects into vessels of resilience and renewal. For me, the project became a way to wrestle with the intimate connection between environmental harm and social injustice—an invitation to see waste not just as a product of excess, but as a space for reckoning and repair.

The rhythm of Dissonance mirrors the layered histories embedded in its materials. It moves between unease and beauty, between loss and possibility, echoing the cyclical nature of waste itself. In this way, the film becomes both a critique and a meditation: a critique of systems that externalize harm onto vulnerable communities and a meditation on the ways we might transform those systems—through reflection, care, and collective accountability.

This work doesn’t claim to offer solutions but instead asks questions: What does it mean to truly see what we throw away? How might we rethink waste as a site of connection and healing rather than harm and dispossession? For me, Dissonance is a personal reckoning, an act of care, and an attempt to create space for others to imagine something different.