Words: Caroline Meyer (@euro_kurd)

My studio used to be made up of several bags, which were usually hidden. Behind the sofa and a mirror as well as picture frames leaning on the wall. Sometimes, when the space allowed it, it came to the surface, specifically on the surface of our kitchen/living room table.

Other times, it came with me down the stairs and outside onto the pavement for more heavy-duty work. Mostly, it didn’t make it far and I didn’t feel able to really get into it – all the possibilities hidden away in those bags – to preserve the shared living space. It accumulated and spread to any free space that was left in my shared flat. Throwing things away always seemed like a waste, but it does especially these days of climate anxiety. Through Hello Dump, I was able to avoid throwing away my sculptural work and other accumulated stuff like unused pills and other ‘waste’. 

It's no wonder that there are more and more artist-led public art spaces in disused places, such as the old Camberwell Kabinett, which is now called Kabinett Gallery (@kabinett.gallery) turning old bus inspector boxes into public exhibition spaces across London and more recently old chewing gum machines into small wunderkammern across Berlin. There is no shortage of disused places going to waste, but there is a shortage of affordable spaces being used for communal artistic projects. The Camberwell Kabinett was eventually removed by the council for “undermining of antisocial behaviour” around it – this begs the question whether the surroundings weren’t rendered antisocial from the start if one art space inviting residents and people passing by into dialogue through a rotating programme of public exhibitions is what is seen as eliciting antisocial behaviour. It is through the writer Marc Augé that I know of airports to be referred to as ‘non-places’ – these days most public spaces can feel like non-spaces, especially in cities where the majority of people simply do not have private gardens or parks close by. If all the concrete around is full of rubbish that the council doesn’t pick up and all the shops are empty and boarded up, people will just want to get through them with their heads down, but people also need to dwell sometimes and people need space. If the concrete that is around us is full of anti-homeless spikes and bird deterrents and rubbish and open, unused space, people will feel the impact of so much hostile architecture and that felt hostility will go somewhere. Giving ourselves and each other a window where the wasted, decaying spaces are used for something new and communal without profit, is giving hope and making space for that. 

About Caroline Meyer

Carolin Meyer is an interdisciplinary artist & DJ based in London. Shaped by her experience of transracial adoption at birth (from Kurdish Yazidi to German), she explores different modes of (dis)embodiment and their translation into viscerally affective interventions using video, sculpture, music, sound, installation, writing, and performance. 
Other than embodiment and the body, she is interested in identity, racialisation, techno-social transformations, and climate change (de-anthropocentrism).

Her work has been published in The Sociological Review, STILL POINT JOURNAL, Vernacular Journal and Protein. In 2023, she was appointed Creative Fellow at UCL, where she explored music as research. She is an Acme studio holder and part of the 2025 cohort at School of the Damned.