What is Wasteland?

Wasteland is a nomadic festival exploring waste ecologies and infrastructures through the lens of art, design, and interdisciplinary research. Each edition unfolds in a different location, in close dialogue with the city and its material flows.

We don’t just look at waste as a problem to solve — we treat it as a lens through which to examine broader questions of extraction, inequality, and planetary care. We think waste is cultural, political, and deeply human. It tells stories about who we are and what we value.

The festival brings together artists, researchers, activists, community groups, and curious publics to share ideas, experiments, and experiences. Since 2022, Wasteland has hosted two public editions in the Netherlands and continues to grow through research, collaborations, and community-rooted projects.

2025 Theme:
Out of Sight

This year, Wasteland heads to Rotterdam — a city shaped by the relentless circulation of goods through its sprawling port and industrial zones, powered by systems of extraction, distribution, and disposal. Here, waste rarely stands still: it is moved, managed, burned, buried, transformed, or shipped away.

Out of Sight investigates how waste is kept invisible. Through logistical routes, bureaucratic systems, and physical infrastructures, waste is removed from public view — but not from consequence. From the incinerators and sorting facilities of the harbour, to the buried pipelines and servers powering Rotterdam’s digital infrastructure — the festival traces the pathways and imaginaries that allow waste to escape public consciousness. What disappears, and what remains? Who is protected from waste, and who is exposed to it?

Rotterdam is also built on waste — quite literally. From dredged riverbeds and sand dumps to landfills and artificial dunes, much of the city rests on reclaimed, reshaped, and re-layered terrain. These postnatural landscapes are carefully engineered to manage the by-products of urban life: sediment redirected to keep shipping routes clear, demolished concrete reused to raise ground levels, industrial spoil buried just out of sight.

Wasteland: Out of Sight digs into these hidden ecologies, revealing how waste doesn’t just vanish — it accumulates, circulates, and becomes part of the land itself. The 2025 edition features a dynamic month-long programme across Rotterdam with artists, thinkers and organisers whose work speaks to these questions — often through embodied, situated or site-specific practices.

What We Do

Festival
A public programme of exhibitions, performances, film screenings, talks, walks, workshops, and installations
‍
‍Collective Dinners
Informal gatherings around shared meals and shared questions
‍
‍Summer School
An annual 3-day learning programme for emerging makers and thinkers
‍
‍Satellite Projects
Collaborations and commissions in the Netherlands and beyond
‍
‍Research
We support long-term, interdisciplinary investigations around waste ecologies

Who We Are

Wasteland is curated and produced bycollective.wasteland an interdisciplinary group working at the intersection of artistic research, spatial practice, and ecological inquiry. Formed in 2022, the collective brings together artists, designers, researchers, organisers and facilitators committed to rethinking our relationship to waste. We believe in learning across disciplines and scales — from material experiments to policy discussions, from bodily performances to system maps. Wasteland wouldn’t exist without a growing network of partners, collaborators, and local communities — in Rotterdam and beyond.

collective.wasteland includes Katya Borisova, Leon Lapa Pereira, Erik Peters and Anne Vera Veen.

PARTNERS

PREVIOUS EDITIONS

PREVIOUS 
EDITIONS

Explore Wasteland Festival 2023