Interview with the collective behind WasteWaves – WORM X Amarte 2025

Get the know the collective behind the free workshop series WasteWaves.

The collective, comprising Nina Blume, Cara Mayer, Robin Vandenbussche, Martijn Van de Wiele, and Lisa van Heyden, connected over their shared interests in sound and spatial topics, each bringing a different background to their collaborative practice, spanning architecture, film, urbanism, and radio.

Their workshop series WasteWaves uses sound to investigate the spatial politics, power relations, and material realities buried in the noise of waste.

Their workshops take place on the 11th, 13th, and 15th of November.

Sign up (free admission) and find more information available here.

HOW DID THE COLLECTIVE COME TOGETHER?

LISA VAN HEYDEN: We are Cara, Robin, Lisa, Nina, and Martijn. We met in and around our studies at Studio For Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Institute and have since been friends and collaborators. We share an interest in sound and researching spatial issues through site-specific work.
First, we came together in 2024, where we had the possibility to take part in the context program at Rewire Festival as a collaboration between students of Immediate Spaces and the temporary masters “Artificial Times”.

We made a sound performance that traces the flow of sand through landscapes, infrastructures and supply chains, a live set that combines field recordings of sand dredging, mechanical transportation of sand, and the movement of sand on the beaches of The Hague with a performative reading on movements of sand drawing from memory and fiction to local news and climate reports.

A year later, we continued our collective research and made a sound piece about the sonic pollution caused by Tata Steel, which we also played at Rewire Festival in 2025. 

When dreaming up our workshop series, we learned about AVR’s waste-to-energy incinerator located in Rosenburg, close to Rotterdam.

CARA MAYER: We all come from slightly different backgrounds, but had a lot of grounding points in common before we first collaborated. Both Robin and Lisa studied architecture, Nina had a big interest in sound and experience with sampling, and Martijn with filming. 

I’ve been working in the radio world in the Netherlands for some years and always enjoyed making radio essays.

Throughout my studies, I was always really impressed with what my peers were doing and coming together felt very natural – all of us share an interest in theory and research, especially in highlighting hidden things within spaces. 

HOW DID THE IDEA OF LISTENING TO WASTE AND WASTE MANAGEMENT INFRASTRUCTURES EMERGE?

CARA MAYER:  I wrote a big research paper on a similar subject in my first year, which ultimately became my entire graduation project. It was about corruption in the waste industry, and the ways in which our disassociation towards our waste allows it to become a commodity that is almost perfect to exploit for crime at mass scale, whether governmental, white collar, or black market, in a globalized world.

I had focused specifically on waste in Amsterdam but came across a lot of shady dealings concerning Rotterdam’s incinerator, which the municipality sold to private hands long, long ago. So that was the specific focus for this iteration of us coming together, but, as said, we all have an interest in hidden things that are oftentimes part of a dominant neoliberal  infrastructure and so choosing to focus on this felt very exciting and easy

And as for using sound as a medium – we all feel that sound is a powerful, intuitive  tool that, with attention, can be used to listen into something that is perhaps a little bit unheard or uncovered. By tapping into the literal material of a space, you also kind of attune yourself to its rhythm, can slow down to try to focus on the dynamics within the space, whether those are economic, social, political, environmental… these dynamics often leave audible traces you can enter as a starting point to the entire topic

NINA BLUME: We have the impression that a lot of the discourse around waste management focuses primarily on the material matter of waste itself. Also on the side of economic interest. After all efforts on spatial practices of camouflage, hiding and denial failed, waste has been rebranded as a resource and commodity. We would even risk saying that architecture, design, and arts, the disciplines we come from, play a complicit role in selling this idea. This whole narrative of infrastructures of disposal increasingly becoming sites of profit extraction, like waste incineration, this capitalistic system behind, that was one topic we want to tackle. Listening to waste infrastructures in this case is an attempt to dematerialize waste in that kind of economic sense while staying attuned to the material realities it impacts: the distant voices of workers, the rhythm of machinery, and the spatial conditions.

WORKSHOP STRUCTURE

CARA MAYER: Our workshop series starts with a day where we sit down and all build our own contact microphone. A contact microphone is a really simple mic that you can make very easily and cheaply with a piezo disc, a soldering wand, some hot glue, and a Jack cable. It’s able to pick up any vibrations in a surface or  material.  To me, it always looked and felt like a stethoscope – a metaphor I really like. You can tune in to the vibrations of anything that you hold it against – sounds transmitted through water by ducks, a shaking train, a guitar. We were really attracted to this metaphor of tuning into what the site we are researching is saying and almost zooming into it on a visceral level – whatever movement it is conducting to us. 

So, first we learn to build these mics (that you take home to keep and use after) and then on the second day, we take a field trip together to visit the industrial outskirts of  the waste incinerator site, discuss some of its recent scandals, and use the mics that we’ve made as well as field recording equipment to make audio sketches of the site, whether those be field recordings, our voices discussing, or vibrations from the contact mics. 

On the third and final day, we come back together at WORM, and using very simple audio software and 404 samplers, put together sound collages that form a loosely-structured and intuitive radio essay, almost a collage about impressions traces of whatever we’ve discovered or uncovered about the space.

AS YOU MENTIONED, YOUR WORKSHOPS DON’T JUST OBSERVE WASTE SYSTEMS FROM AFAR, AS THEY BRING PARTICIPANTS ON SITE, ASKING THEM TO LISTEN WITH THEIR WHOLE BODIES. WHY IS THIS EMBODIED, COMMUNAL APPROACH TO LISTENING IMPORTANT TO YOU?

MARTIJN VAN DE WIELE: Visiting a place with the intention of recording sound, is a very specific attitude towards that environment. You listen to the sounds around you in an active way, and start to notice all these details and layers. In that way field recording allows you to become more aware of your environment, it’s an act of paying attention, you’re listening to an environment as a first step towards understanding it more.  There’s a physical aspect to it, when you’re recording on site and holding the microphone, you move around, and let your body guide the microphone towards whatever sound draws your attention. So your physical presence ends up influencing what the recording sounds like.

ROBIN VANDENBUSSCHE: For me what Martijn is saying also relates to our desire to be site specific in our work, and to deal with the reality of a space, which can be traced back to most of us being trained as spatial practitioners.  Your question was also asking about communal listening, and I think for us, yes it’s a collective moment and exercise of listening to the same space, but we will all have a very different experience recording and listening. The communal aspect is also important, to create a more layered reading of the space through everyone’s individual perspective and experience.

CARA MAYER: We were talking about what it means to walk through a space with the intention to record it, and what it means to attune yourself, and this meditative zone that you can get in when you’re recording. I’m always surprised when I see children use field recording mics for the first time. I gave my girlfriend my field recording mic to record her hometown and her little nine-year-old sister was using it and just immediately became obsessed. It’s just a way of sparking such a natural curiosity about even the spaces that might feel banal to you. These things that feel normal, that you wouldn’t immediately think of as musical or as research material. Even just the act of having headphones on and holding a microphone changes your perspective on everything that you’re hearing. Everything becomes music, becomes sonic material. And a field recording microphone or a contact microphone is able to pick up such detailed sounds. It’s a totally new way of listening to the world around you. That kind of curiosity about the world totally parallels an interest in uncovering things that are hidden or buried, and is  political in so many ways. It’s just something all of us are really interested in, slowing down and tuning into something, and then bringing it back out through sound.

WHY SOUND? WHAT DOES LISTENING AND WORKING WITH VIBRATIONS, RECORDINGS, AND SAMPLING ALLOW YOU TO UNCOVER THAT OTHER SENSORY APPROACHES MIGHT NOT?

LISA VAN HEYDEN: For us, it’s a way to access a place collectively. This method of collecting and gathering sounds from different perspectives lets us connect with a place, where each sound carries an individual experience. By sampling and bringing them together, we create a sonic image that is somehow incomplete and incoherent but tells the story of this specific moment that we share. Listening and sound therefore matters because it’s relational and subjective and embraces the gaps and overlaps. And we can hear what often escapes the eye like the textures, rhythms and resonances that shape our experience. 

ROBIN VANDENBUSSCHE: Also, this site is quite inaccessible in a lot of ways, and then extracting sound from it gives us something to start a conversation and maybe a portrait or a sketch of that space. It’s a way to extract something and get material to work with together. In a way it’s making something inaccessible more accessible.  

CARA MAYER: Sound is also just such an intuitive and primal kind of matter. It’s very accessible to work with sound and that’s why we also wanted to emphasize having a support structure around the sampler, using very simple open-source software, and guiding people through that as part of the workshop. I think these vibrations that move through your body, how you relate to them, and the curiosity or sensitive attunement that that can spark in you is very different from academic perspective that somebody might naturally adopt before approaching a big topic such as waste. I feel like sound is a very immediate way of accessing a topic, there’s just a lot of playfulness. And as Lisa was saying, it can be a little bit more personal, you don’t need to observe this sterile posture to prove its value. It can be open-ended and a bit mysterious, allow for nuance, interpretation, and open the door for further research and conversation. 

YOUR FINAL WORKSHOP AIMS TO CREATE A SONIC ARCHIVE OF ROTTERDAM’S WASTESCAPES. WHAT ROLE DO ARCHIVES PLAY IN YOUR PRACTICE, ESPECIALLY CONSIDERING THEIR POLITICAL WEIGHT AND POTENTIAL TO PRESERVE OVERLOOKED STORIES?

NINA BLUME: I think, at least in parts, it’s related to our studies at Studio for Immediate Spaces, where our tutors, Ana Maria Gómes López and Katia Truijen, taught us about archives and their political weight. On the other hand, it’s much more rooted in frameworks outside of institutions and the act of recording and detecting has been reclaimed by civil society, by activists, investigative journalists, and the artistic community. Searching, producing and gathering evidence to surface what dominant narratives fail to hold. That’s where we see the potential lies. 

We approach it somewhere between investigative and artistic. We understand recording as a kind of archival act of tapping into the stories that are embedded in the site and processes. Equipped with field-recorders and our DIY contact microphones as research tools, the second session invites participants to take part in this site-specific archival exploration around the AVR waste incinerator in Rotterdam‘s harbour to collectively build the sonic archive from their individual perspectives. Back in the studio, we gather to interpret and process the materials we have recorded using sampling techniques. I think sampling relates to the way we understand archives; a method to foreground incompleteness and incoherence to invite multiple readings, which stands in contrast to conventional archival efforts that often try to stabilise fragments into one narrative or system.
And then having this collective moment of composing it together and finding the narratives somewhere in between this.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE YOUR COLLECTIVE WILL GET OUT OF WORKING ON THE PROJECT?

MARTIJN VAN DE WIELE: We’re excited toto open up our collaborative artistic practice and see how others interact with it. As a new collective, we’re still figuring out our methodology. By organizing these workshops, we’re interested to see how other people relate to what we have been doing and how we use sound as a medium to approach topics like infrastructure. 

CARA MAYER: An important part of how we planned the workshops, or how we chose what activities to do, and what to include, was definitely to try to demystify the tech, make it clear how accessible and easy this stuff is. While sound is very intuitive, sometimes the actual hardware that people use or the software needed to produce an audio-piece can feel like an entry barrier. I know that when I started working in sound, I was very intimidated by, you know, older men using modulars or honestly even just a damn CDJ, like, okay, this thing looks like a spaceship by now, with a million buttons, it must be beyond me. I think there’s something really powerful about learning how simple it actually is to make a pretty robust contact microphone, to understand a bit about how it works and see how many different things you can use it for. I hope people walk away with some new, definitive skills, and, worst case, at least they have a new contact microphone they can use for whatever other projects they’d like to. By dipping it in glue, you make a pretty robust hydrophone, which sounds even fancier. Go record yourself singing underwater.

I also hope this workshop makes the format of a radio essay more accessible. It’s such a fun playful way to go through the motions of writing an essay, forming a critique on something, learning about a topic, and publishing whatever you want.  I hope that it shows that academic, political, or journalistic work can also be creative, fun and intuitive – that it can allow for ambiguity and space.

LISA VAN HEYDEN: Also, as we continue developing this practice, coming from different backgrounds, we’re talking a lot about where this is going and how we work together. It’s a constant process of learning and exchanging  knowledge within our team, and now we want to open that up to participants, allowing new perspectives to join into this process. It’s always nice to learn from and with each other.

And to spend some time together and see each other, because we don’t live in the same place anymore. And to have fun of course! 

ROBIN VANDENBUSSCHE: It’s also a new format for us. We’ve never done workshops before and I think that it’s an interesting way to approach a topic or a space. The last time we worked together, we were focusing on a sound performance, and I feel like a workshop is also a way to, like Cara talked about, explore the political, academic or journalistic layers. Combining all these different kinds of methodologies seems easier through a workshop. There’s space for different approaches and conversations with all the participants, rather than just having our reading of the space, and I think we’re all interested in this way of working.

OKAY, GREAT, THANK YOU!

Follow the collective on their Instagram here.

Interview by Madeleine Martin.

Visuals by Jonathan Castro (Instagram).

Photograph 1 courtesy of the collective.

Photograph 2 by Jeroen De Jong (Instagram).

WasteWaves is part of WORM x Amarte 2025, a residency programme in which the two organisations provide a space for four collectives to develop new workshop series and advance their artistic practices.