This is based on the project proposal I presented to our Experimental class under Prof. Sari Dalena on 5 May 2023. This has been modified from the original.
Big FOUR Trashtalkan was a Facebook private group created during the first COVID-19 lockdowns. It was a "safe space" where students could freely express their frustrations and ultimately exchange insults to each other, aka trashtalkan.
Trash talk culture was the topic of the ethnographic paper I co-wrote in 2021 where we found that the trashtalkan that was specific in that virtual community at that particular time was a timely and helpful tool for community building among the university students, especially during those depressing months of lockdown and isolation.
Yet, this is not particular to trashtalkan but to trash, or basura. This is part of an ongoing project of mine where I take and collect photos of basura that interest me for the reason that I will be talking about here.
There are two ways to view basura. One is our literal, superficial, and immediate perception of what basura is. The second one, however, goes beyond the materiality of the basura. Meaning, it involves other factors or contexts apart from the very basura itself. And this is often linked to the person from whom it came.
For example is the photo above. Noong nadaaan ko ito papuntang A2, na-curious ako kung “Bakit siya nasa daan?” “Bakit halos hindi pa nabawasan ‘yung laman?” "Kanino ito?" And from these seemingly innocent questions, hindi maiiwasan na magkaroon din ng critical assumptions specifically directed sa may-ari, and that being judging the person na “Wala siyang disiplina.”
This instance gets more complicated: kapag hindi na lang iisang basura ang tinitignan. Kagaya nitong (below) kinuha ko naman sa Molave, showing the diversity of the dorm residents in terms, for example, of consumption that is determined and nuanced by our varying economic capacities.
Okay, so before I conclude this, let me go back to BFT to emphasize that the trashtalk per se is not an isolated object; it always implicates the person who spoke or posted it.
The same goes for basura. They are not exactly “basura” in the literal sense of the word for they serve as an index of whom-where-when they came from. This, then, goes to say that we, too, are never totally detached from the things that we thought no longer serve or belong to us. With this linking, we come to view that things—anything for that matter—hold relevance because of the mere fact that they are inevitably attached to something.
The same goes for movies.